Decent Western Food in Jing'an

I love talking bad about the foreigner food in Shanghai. That’s just what I do. OK, the food has it coming; it’s none of it very good, and really I don’t think there’s any foreign restaurants that would make it if they were based back in San Francisco. But partially I just like complaining about restaurants, and really I could whine on and one about even my favorites.

But I’m going to take a break from the trend with this update, and talk about a couple Western Restaurants that, while not perfect, I’ll give a qualified recommendation. They’re both reasonably tasty, reasonably inexpensive restaurants that are worth casual visits.

The first is Munchies, a American Restaurant in the modus of Shanghai’s other American Restaurants, where in addition to a psychedelic Pac-Man logo, there’s a menu full of hamburgers and hot dogs. I mean I guess back in America I’d eat hamburgers and hot dogs every once in a while, like at ballgames or on the 4th of July, but it’s a little strange how it’s the staple of nearly every single American Restaurant in Shanghai. But I have given both of them a try at Munchies, and they’re both good renditions.



It wins points for having a side of a decent cole slaw (or French Fries or various salads), but really hamburgers are boring, who cares. Most interesting is that they have Cincinnati Chili. I’ve actually never heard of that before, and was only vaguely aware of the idea. It’s a Midwestern variation of Chili, with cinnamon and all-spice, and not any heat at all. Instead of dumping it on rice like anyone sensible human being, they dump it on spaghetti! It also comes in different 'specials', where maybe they’ll also dump cheese or onions or beans on the spaghetti. This is a five-way special:



Except for the hamburgers the portions are more of a snack than a meal, and the desserts are just cake and ice cream. Regardless, go for the chili, and if any gentle readers can say a word about whether it’s authentic, that would be appreciated. Actually I’d recommend searching some Cincinnati Chili down, even for those in the US - Amazon has mix packets of Skyline Chili, maybe they’re worth it?

Munchies is on 974 Wuding Lu, near Changde Lu, about a ten minute walk north of Jing'an Si Station. Meals cost somewhere around 50 kuai per person, about $7.50, and it's open from 10 until late every day.

The other place I'll mention here is Wagas, a chain with numerous locations wherever white people congregate. I tend towards the branch on Jiaozhou Lu and Xinzha Lu, about a five minute walk north of Jing'an. I’ve known about Wagas for years, but just as an annoying Café. OK I’m not a café person and so I can’t claim expertise, and their black coffee does seem pretty decent. However the several times I had gone before, it was over-run with office-away-from-office people, all on their computers and loudly talking business on their cellphones. Since I go to cafes to chat or study, it’s kind of not the atmosphere I go for.

However I found out that after six at night they have a deal where their pseudo-Italian dishes get priced down to 33 or 40 kuai, that’s about five or six dollars. It’s a pretty good deal: some of the pastas are really excellent, I haven't had them all, but my favorite has been a pasta with pumpkin, spinach, and feta cheese. Additionally the meals come with a small salad and a few pieces of very plain bread.



It’s not all perfect: Wagas’ atmposphere just isn’t as relaxed as a café should be, and I guess the computer nearby my food shows I’m guilty of treating Wagas as an office, as well. It’s also strictly a restaurant to visit by yourself, and between the bad atmosphere and the dog-bowl-like serving plate, I’d strongly recommend taking someone out to even Saizeriya, before Wagas.

Also, a simple can of soda costs 20 kuai, the equivalent of three dollars, which makes sense for a café but is kind of absurd if you’re there for inexpensive pasta. A few of the dishes are horrible, one pasta dish is literally noodles, thin chicken strips, and a quarter of a lemon for you to squeeze on top. So, order with a degree of caution, and things generally aren’t perfect, but on the other hand, excellent 33 kuai pastas make it all worthwhile.



I’ll end this post with a semi-apology. I have very strong feelings about what’s happening in Xinjiang, and I feel a little silly writing a China blog and talking about a couple semi-competent Western Restaurants. Adding on to the absurdity is that this blog is censored in China, and my counter-censorship service is also being censored, and I'm doing weird run-arounds to get this blog posted.

However from the beginning I’ve given myself rules for this blog, it’s not a personal account of the awesome party I went to over the weekend, it’s non-political, and so forth. I'd surely break the rule if I had a wonderfully informed opinion or any special information, or perhaps if I went to a particularly bouncing party over the weekend, but that's not the case. I do encourage everyone to inform themselves about what’s happening, even if it’s just a quick look over Wikipedia entry on Xinjiang.

Saizeriya

I've said before that Chinese people never eat foreign foods. However, while that's not exactly a lie, that's not exactly true, either. There exists a fraction of a percent of Shanghai's Chinese population that enjoys popping into Shanghai's foreigner restaurants from time to time. And there's a much larger percentage, although still a small minority, that enjoys eating the few styles of foreign food that Shanghai has most taken to – basically that's American fast food chains, Japanese food, and to a lesser extent, Italian food. Ill have to talk about Shanghai's Japanese food some othet time - it's localized so strangely. This is about the Italian chain restaurant, Saizeriya.

Saizeriya is not anybody's version of fine dining. Even judging on a cheap-restaurant graded scale, every dish on the menu would get somewhere between a D+ and a B-. That said, there's a few things that can be said in its favor. While the food wouldn't be confused with something in Italy, it's not a totally Chinesed-out interpretation either, and is about as authentic as might be expected at an American-Italian restaurant. It's relatively cheap, most of the dishes cost about ten kaui. It's spacious and clean, whereas many Chinese restaurants are dirty and cramped. But most importantly, it's the only semi-decent restaurant in the Kerry Everbright Center, near the Shanghai Train Station. For a while I found myself frequently having to eat dinners there, so I went to Saizeriya far too many times, and I've tried a sizeable percentage of the menu. It's not something I'm proud of.

For me, the highlight of Saizeriya is that they serve large salads that, while basic, are of a high quality, and only cost six to ten kuai. They come heavy in salad dressing, so I usually get the dressing on the side. And in general the pasta dishes are all competent, I like the pesto spaghetti - the only one to watch out for the risotto, which basically amounts to a rice with cream sauce on it.



They have pizza, and ever since Hello Pizza massively raised their prices a couple years back, it's the cheapest pizza in town, costing around twenty kuai for enough to make a meal for one. They're a whole lot of cheese, and not much sauce.



The obvious weak point is at the end of the menu, with the unappetizing hamburger steaks and especially the grilled chicken, that tastes rubbery and weird. The desserts, while not bad, aren't as good as they should be – really there's no reason to get a dessert at Saizeriya, when all the locations I'm familiar with have a Beard Papa right nearby.



There's all-you-can-drink mugs for six kuai, with sodas and juice and hot chocolate and the like to choose from. The mug is small, so I end up making a lot of trips to the drinks area.

There's a few other local Italian restaurants chains I can think of, in Shanghai – Gino's and Babiya being two that stand out. They're more expensive, and while Gino's might be a little better, Babiya is much worse. There's also a number of higher-quality, expensive places that target expats. Anyway, while I don't particularly recommend Saizeriya, it's cheap, it's decent, there's locations in malls and shopping areas all around town, and if you're looking for a foreign-food fix you could do a whole lot worse.

Punjabi Indian Cuisine

Punjabi Indian Cuisine is an Indian restaurant located downtown. It's located near Shaanxi Nan Lu Station, from there walk a block to Xiangyang Lu, cross the street, turn left, and walk a half block. Punjabi Cuisine is located at 102 Xiangyang Lu, on the third floor. From the outside, the sign is really dirty and old, and in general the place looks like it might be kind of sketchy. The first time I saw it, I was ready to turn back!



On a tangent, I also thought it was funny that there's a clothing store a few doors over called “Ranma 1/2,” a Japanese cartoon I liked in college. There's no connection, except for the name:



Despite the scary sign and having to climb a couple not-impressive flights of stairs, the actual insides of the restaurant are quite nice. Clean, modern, comfortable, and with really corny paintings on the wall:



I've only had the lunch special, on the weekend, there's a meat version and also a vegetarian version that I've never tried. It costs fourty nine kuai, about $7.50, and it comes on a metal tray like an army canteen. Despite the utilitarian metal tray, the foods are colorful and pleasing to the eye. All of the foods are delicious, and reasonably authentic-tasting (I'm no expert, although I've been to India and my sister lived there), and the spices were only turned down somewhat. All in all, I'd call the food very good, but not outstanding. The portions were large, if not huge. It also includes a basket of pretty good naan, which I didn't take a picture of.



There's also an 88 kuai dinner buffet, but unless you haven't eaten in several days, or are visiting by yourself, I doubt it's a good value – most of the dishes cost somewhere around fourty kuai, it's probably a better bet just ordering what you want. The menu is very large, it contains both genuine Indian food, and foreigner Indian foods like Chicken Tikka Masala, and as would be expected there's a North Indian slant to it all. Unfortunately it doesn't offer Indian-Chinese foods like Lollipop Chicken, that would be awesome.

I've been several times, and it's always been a little sparsely populated, and every single other person in the restaurant that wasn't with me was Indian – I found that surprising, anyway. I understand it's more popular for weekend dinners, when there's Indian folk music performed. All in all I wouldn't call this an amazing restaurant, but when I get in the occasional mood for Indian food, this is my favorite place to go.

On Foreigner Food in Shanghai; A Few Mexican Restaurants in Particular

I try to avoid talking too much about foreign food in Shanghai, and that's not because I never eat it myself, but because foreign food in Shanghai just doesn't feel like an integrated part of the city. Whereas in the US, everybody eats foreign foods without thinking twice about it, in Shanghai the only people who eat at most foreign restaurants are expats and their romantic interests.

There's many reasons for this, and yes I think it's partly because Chinese citizens can be very provincial. But I think the larger part is that this food is almost universally of a low quality, I don't think there is a single Western Restaurant in Shanghai that could survive on quality in, say, San Francisco. And the prices for this mediocre food is generally much higher than it'd be in California - it's hard to compare, but I'd call the prices about 50% - 100% higher than what would be typical in San Francisco. Finally, this is all happening in price-driven Shanghai, where beer costs a quarter, manapua costs a dime, and you're never going to be more than a five minute's walk from a place that serves a quality local-style meal for $2.

I'll start with a few case studies, a couple of recently opened California-Mexican Restaurants. The first is the recently opened Agave Cantina, near-ish to Jing'an Si, at the corner of Changle Lu and Jinmin Lu. It's a California-Mexican Restaurant that's quickly picked up a huge following. How, or why, baffles the mind. At 65 kuai for a burrito, there's nothing inside this stale tortilla but meat, have a gander:



It's an obvious mis-understanding of what a burrito is, and in the US nobody would seriously consider going to this restaurant. And yet in Shanghai, foreigners are lining around the block! While I could understand paying more for quality, the quality isn't there, and by local standards the price is absurd. People go purely out of a sentimental attachment to burritos. To emphasize, a small group of friends could either get one of these apiece, or they could spend the same amount of money to get an exorbitantly large, multi-course meal at, say, the excellent Xiao Bai Hua. Or for those who measure prices in terms of alcohol, they could go to a local Convenience Store and get twenty-four cans of beer, plus a Fried-Chicken Microwave Burrito:



I'm more positive about El Mexicano, a small new local chain. And I think pricing is a part of it: Shanghai restaurants are operating in a city where 50 kuai ($7) gets one an excellent meal, and 100 kuai gets a restaurant worthy of raves. It would be difficult to spend more than 50 kaui at El Mexicano, and if the burritos aren't much more authentic than Agave Cantina's, they're tastier. And I think the horchata is good, and the tacos, at 7 kuai apiece, are nearly authentic enough to have fallen out the back of a taco truck – a slice of lemon standing in for a slice of lime being the biggest difference. OK, I'd never claim this restaurant to be excellent, and if this place opened in California it wouldn't last a week. Still, El Mexicano is a model of what I'd like to see in foreigner restaurants in Shanghai – prices comparable to a Chinese meal, and food that's at the least moderately authentic and tasty.



I also think there are a very few exceptions to the rule of Shanghai's foreigner food all being bad or at least overpriced, most notably certain Japanese restaurants, and perhaps Thai House. And of course I realize there's people for whom the money involved is of no real concern. I'm not one of those people, and I wouldn't be even if I was a millionaire, and even if I was one of those people, I'd still think that the Foreigner Restaurants in Shanghai are sorry.

Kimura Japanese Kitchen & Some Katsu

In my somewhat limited experience, the best Japanese restaurant in Shanghai goes by the name Kimura Japanese Kitchen. Well...it's not easy to tell exactly what the name is, as the billboard seems a random mash of Chinese, Japanese, and English. It's located at 2255 Beijing Road, near Jiaozhou Road and a little north of Jing'an Si, and here's a picture of the sign:



As somebody who won't even go for a California Roll, thinking it's just too unauthentic, China's take at Japanese food is worlds beyond that. Sushi, for instance, will have mayonnaise piled on, sometimes it'll be pressed into the form of a sandwich, it'll have sweet things added to it, and maybe it'll get heated up in the microwave before serving.

So there's plenty of Japanese restaurants, but many of them are either extremely un-authentic, or are targeted at the Japanese expat community. That makes it way out of the price I prefer to pay for a meal, particularly as I'm not a huge fan of Japanese food. Kimura Japanese Kitchen is a favorite for the way it breaks out of this pattern. It's authentic, the owner is Japanese, there's Japanese signboards, and most of the customers can be heard speaking Japanese. But it's also cheap, as far as Shanghai's foreign food goes. Consequently, the place is usually pretty packed, even if you can't tell that here:



The simple interior reminds me of a basic restaurant from the times I've been to Japan, and the menus and signs are in both Japanese and in Chinese. They also have an English menu.



My favorite thing to get is the katsu, maybe because I like it in a Hawaiian plate lunch, ha ha. Here's the katsu curry, it costs about $4:



And my friend quite liked her ramen, which is more photogenic, anyway:



For katsu fans, there's also a very good, very Japanese-style place around the corner on 176 Jiazhou Lu, near Beijing Lu. Forgive me if I make a Japanese mistake, but I think the name would transliterate to Shi-chan's Tonkatsu? Get the fatty tonkatsu, it's better than the lean. It is a little expensive though, at about $10 for a not-large order. Here's a picture of the storefront:



The Japanese chain Curry House, which is also in Honolulu and pretty much exactly the same (they don't offer "The Challenge"), has a rapidly-expanding number of stores in Shanghai. They're casual, and always crowded. Somehow it inspired a Japanese video game as well, wow. The katsu and curry rice is about the same price as Kimura's, if not as good. It's still decent and there's a lot of different varieties, and I think the place is worth going to. The food is, uhh, better than it looks:

Loco Moco: A Quick Second Take.

While I want to avoid this blog being a Foreign Food Information Repository, here's a re-examination of both City Diner, a prominent American Restaurant, and Loco Moco, a Hawaiian food that any monkey with a skillet should be able to cook correctly. I'll steal a picture from 'Ono Kine Grindz:



I happened to come across a menu for City Diner and noted that they offered Loco Moco for breakfast, very interesting. I wouldn't call it a breakfast food but I guess theoretically it could be eaten in the morning, and anyway City Diner advertises they serve breakfast all day. The food was even described as being "onolicious" which I guess was promising enough to make me look past that the food from my previous visit was expensive and totally hopeless. Really the restaurant was so bad I couldn't imagine any way it could get better, it would be best just to burn the restaurant to the ground and start over.

Eventually when I felt I could in good conscious buy an $8 Loco Moco I came in and made my order, this is what I was served:



Huh, from the picture it seems to be a platter of steak-and-eggs, like they do it in Texas! With a little bit of rice on the side, too. I did some minor surgery to make it more authentic, dumping all the ingredients on top of each other:



That's better, but still the proportions were off, it was dry, and the tastes weren't quite right - especially with the macaroni salad, which was prepared like a German Potato Salad and didn't use any mayonnaise. On the other hand, it was enough food that I basically skipped dinner and only wanted a half-lunch the next day.

So I have to recommend giving it a miss, too bad! I did notice one interesting thing, that the very good Gordon Biersch Marzen, and the decent-if-light Kona Longboard Lager, were both available there - I haven't seen either at stores yet. Along with Dead Guy Ale, there seems to be a recent trickle of American micro-brews getting imported, which is nothing if not excellent news.

Hawaiian Food in Shanghai

The Title is a subject that holds great promise - Hawaiian food in Shanghai! Who couldn't love it! On my recent trip to Honolulu I did my own unofficial "Super Size Me 2," by eating Plate Lunches for basically every single meal. To establish the proper context, here's some old-school food, from a Hawaiian mall's food court. It's a combination plate of pork, chicken long rice, lomilomi salmon, and poi:



And here's a "chili moco," which dumps chili over a hamburger steak, egg, and rice - a normal loco moco has gravy instead of chili. It was a special at the local chain, Zippy's.



Anyway I love the food and it's one of the many kinds of restaurants I'd love to see open in Shanghai. On the rare occasions I cook, that's the kind of food I make, and I even dream of opening a local style restaurant, maybe right next to the Vietnamese-sandwich & pho restaurant I'll open next door. I always thought of it as just a daydream, so I was shocked and surprised to be walking on Sinan Lu, next to Xianghshang Lu and Fuxing Park, and come across "Tammy's Sweet Dream." The Aloha shirts and floral motif made me curious, so I looked at the menu and saw it was a Hawaiian restaurant!



The menu didn't look entirely promising: a lot of these foods are very basic, but the prices were a little high - six or seven dollars. It was missing basic favorites like katsu. Also, what is fish lau-lau? Lau Lau is made from pork. I had a seat, the insides were nice and new and mostly empty, although I had made it a very late lunch. I should also mention a corner of the room with a star wars motif - a lot of small framed Star Wars posters. But mostly it was white and vaguely tiki:



I got the loco moco, it was like the chef had read a brief description of the dish but never actually eaten one himself. The main problem was the almost total lack of gravy, making the dish extremely dry. There was also some cabbage mixed in, which was just weird. Finally, the dish was very small, the amount I got was more like a snack. If my complaints sound petty, loco moco is neither a difficult nor an expensive dish to prepare!



About ten minutes after I got my dish, my friend got hers, it was hulihuli chicken, a grilled and specially flavored chicken. It didn't really get the hulihuli treatment, it was just normal grilled chicken.



So all in all I thought this restaurant was a big disappointment. It was more authentic than the Hawaiian joints that serve pineapple hamburgers, but the food was so poorly interpreted that I'd really have to be jonesing for Hawaiian food before I'd drop by.

Update 11/30/07 - I never did return and I guess I never will - according to Christopher St. Cavish's always entertaining food article in SH Magazine, the restaurant has closed.

Thai House

It's a longish walk from my apartment to the Thai House, an unlicensed Thai restaurant I enjoy. Even though delivery is free, I've never really considered doing that. For me, the food itself is overshadowed by its location:



That may not look like much. It actually might look like an anonymous apartment building that could be seen anywhere, which is part of the charm. Locating the restaurant has something of the feel of going to a speakeasy, you have no idea where it is until you step inside. But you won't find the hidden location from me! Not that the Shanghai Restaurant Licensing Bureau regularly reads my blogs, but the place doesn't advertise, it's purely a word of mouth affair.



The layout is like an apartment, with the dining area being divided into three different rooms. But these rooms are actually pretty large, with maybe six tables per room, and also a small bar counter by the entrance.



When I've been, most of the patrons are Japanese, sometimes it's Chinese people. However the language skills of the staff are all lacking, the Thai waitresses only speak very basic English and even worse Chinese. Every single time I've been there I've had a language communication problem. I went with a Chinese person once, and she ended up ordering herself two seperate lunches!

I generously ended up helping her polish off her food. The size of the dishes are too small, and many of the lunch specials feel more like a snack than a meal. I also feel the quality of many of the dishes is adequate, but nothing special - including trademark dishes like the curries and the papaya salad. By far the best dish I've had there has been this steamed whitefish I ordered:



Sort of interesting, it was just the very slightest bit undercooked when I ordered it, under-cooking a whitefish is just a tragedy. However I noticed it uses a dry flame candle underneath the pan. The pan brings the broth of the dish to a low boil, both keeping the dish warm, and fully cooking the meat. The broth was strong-tasting, almost like a soup, with lemon grass, peppers, limes, basil, and the usual suspects of Thai cooking.

The soups are clearly outstanding, the complex balance of flavorings is pretty much exactly what I think food should taste like. They also serve a tea which has a taste I would describe as vaguely chocolate-ish. It always surprises me with how much I like it before a meal, and how little I like it afterwards.



This particular meal of fish, tea, shrimp chips, soup, and a haupia-like dessert, cost me $5, not bad at all! The small bowl of rice cost an extra dollar, what's up with that?

So although the dishes are very inconsistent and too small, now that I have a better idea of what to order, this is my favorite foreign restaurant in Shanghai.


Update 6/20/2009 - I hate to say this about a place I've loved for quite a while now, but the prices have steadily risen while the quality has steadily declined. This is still a quite nice restaurant, and I still go, but it's no longer a great one.

City Diner

"You know how Americans are, Kiki. They all love to travel, and then they only want to meet other Americans and talk about how hard it is to get a decent hamburger."

-Hans, "Naked Lunch" (1991)

This update is about an American-style restaurant in Shanghai, City Diner. I've talked before about foreign food in Shanghai, basically I've written it all off as boring and too expensive. I still eat my fair share, and I think there's some OK places, although they all have their caveats. For instance I recently visited Moon River Diner, a chain with decent food that copies the feeling of walking into the set of Happy Days, with the 50s style decor and all that. A nice place, if nothing amazing, but the locations are inconvenient, and it's about ten times more expensive than the neighborhood places near where I live or work.

City Diner is a competitor, with one major advantage: it's located fairly near my apartment, alongside a somewhat seedy strip of Western bars. I've been past the area a few times, somehow I had missed that a place called City Diner was there. Or maybe I had seen it and just didn't think much of it. Come last week, I was about to pass it by, when I remembered reading that it had won a chili cook-off a few months back.

City Diner also goes for a Happy Days theme, with the old-style Coca-Cola ads and Rock Hudson movie posters, and Otis Redding on the jukebox. It even has a blackboard that helpfully lists the soup of the day as "soup."



But overall it's not over-the-top about it, and while there's the Happy Days elements, it's mostly subdued decor, shiny black tables, wide windows overlooking the street below, and so forth. I went for lunch on a weekday, it almost had the feel of an office - it was entirely foreigners with laptops.

Of course that's all ancillary to the meal, and here I don't want to equivocate: the food was awful. Ghastly. Not good. Dissatisfactory. Starting with the chili:



The chili came topped with a little cheese and sour cream and with a side of cornbread, like they do it in Texas! It was listed in the soup section of the menu, and that should have tipped me off: it was overly watery, and I was given a spoon to eat it with. Worse still, the taste was incredibly simple, and not at all spicy, even though the "5 alarm chili" name implies some kind of fire hazard. Being an American-style diner I reached over for the Tabasco Sauce, but they didn't have any.

It got me very curious. I'd rather eat canned chili with a dollop or two of hot sauce. How did this win any kind of competition? I theorize it was cooked a week before and had lost something in the meantime, and also that the competition was very weak, and also that the cook was working very loosely from the diner's recipe. There's probably a few other factors involved that skip my mind. After the first bite I considered asking for my money back, but I hate being one of "those guys."

There's a sucker born every minute, so still feeling hungry after the chili, I ordered pumpkin pie. I've actually been jonesing for some, I haven't had any pie in the last two years!



The pie was goopy and mediocre. It was a little strange to have only a dark butterscotch sauce and no whipped cream, but actually the butterscotch sauce was pretty good. Also the soda was free-refills, it was like being back in the US! They used a large pitcher though. It's easier for the waiter, but it let the soda go flat by the time he poured it.

All in all it cost me a locally-exorbitant $10, was incredibly boring, and there's no way I would ever return. Well...I did notice some onion-garlic bagels on the way out, maybe I'll get one to go someday.



I hope this update doesn't sound like an angry strike back at a restaurant I'm particularly upset about. City Diner was pretty much on par for Western restaurants in Shanghai: a familiar menu, too expensive, and with incompetent execution. There's better Western food to be found at Burger King, just a few minute's walk away.