Wu Yue Ren Jia Noodles

The foreigner shopping complex of Taikang Lu is fun, I've written about it before, and there's a few stores within which I hope to write about in the near future. At the same time, despite having a whole lot of restaurants, none of them look particularly appealing to me. I'm perfectly willing to believe there's some place I haven't been to yet that's actually really good, but a cursory look around makes it seem to be a bunch of typical foreigner restaurants, over-priced and unexceptional.

When I'm in the area, my favorite place to get food is the nearby Wu Yue Ren Jia, a branch of a local noodle chain restaurant. While in the US “chain restaurant” conjures up the image of McDonald's or Olive Garden, in Shanghai many of even the most upscale restaurants will open a few branches around the city. Wu Yue Ren Jia is not one of the most upscale restaurants – however while many of the branches are just a step up from any other cheap noodle joint, the Taikang Lu branch is pretty fancy inside, clean and spacious and generally new-looking. They even play traditional Suzhou music softly in the background, I like that.



The “Wu Yue” in the name is a reference to an ancient state in Southern Jiangsu and Northern Zhejiang, the geographical surroundings of Shanghai. While the noodles themselves are just basic Southern Chinese noodles and nothing fancy, the accompanying meat or vegetables are mostly local specialties. They're generally very good - they're served alongside the bowl in a smaller plate, and can either be eaten separately, or placed in the soup bowl. Personally, I think the soup broth is too bland without adding at least some of the sauce.



The noodle dishes are fairly cheap, but on the small side. Here's a look at their selection of noodles, although the menu is only in Chinese:



It's probably worth getting a side dish to go along with the noodles. Again, most of the dishes are local specialties, I've had about half the menu and I have to say I've enjoyed everything. They're not substantial enough to make a meal out of them alone, to my mind, but one could certainly try. My favorites are probably the si xi kaofu (spongy tofu) and the wu xiang niu rou (five fragrance cold beef). The second half of the menu is to the right of this paragraph, although there's also temporary specials and the normal assortment of drinks. Here's a picture of their cucumber. It's quite nice, although cucumber is so basic that it would be hard to do wrong:



All in all, Wu Yue Ren Jia isn't a destination restaurant, the way the other Shanghainese Restaurants I've mentioned so far are. The food just isn't as good or as ambitious. However, it's casual, it's thoroughly local-style, it's perfectly normal for a person to visit by themselves or as a group, and it's a good place to go if you find yourself nearby. The bill might come out to twenty or thirty kuai per person, the equivalent to three or four dollars. The Taikang Lu branch is at #5 Taikang Lu, right where Sinan Lu hits Taikang Lu, but there's a number of branches around town.

Lan Ting

Lan Ting Kitchen is the Shanghainese restaurant I've been to the most, unless I count the local-style greasy spoons or xiaolongbao shacks I pop into. It follows the pattern of many of my favorite Shanghainese Restaurants: amazing food, cheapish price, no English, and a small & packed environment with no atmosphere other than a certain “wow, this is really different than the US” novelty. There's six small tables, half of them seat two people, and half of them seat four, with a little squeezing.



Lan Ting is conveniently located at 107 Song Shan Road, it's a couple blocks away from exit number two of the very central Huangpi Nan Lu Subway Station, nearish to Xintiandi. It doesn't take reservations, and there's generally a line outside – you take your chances. Arrive on the weekdays or at around five on the weekends, and there might well be either no line or just a short line. On the weekends, it's more like fifteen minutes to an hour.



The menu is extensive, generally a waiter will give a copy to people in line, to order before they sit down – that sounds terrible, but the restaurant doesn't push customers through, and even if they did, it's not really the sort of place to linger. The menu is divided into different types of food, each with their own page, and every page has a few of the most popular dishes highlighted. Someone without any Chinese should be able to order fine, just by selecting a highlighted dish from a number of different pages. Inevitably, looking at other tables, 90% of the dishes ordered are these highlighted dishes.



Here's a dish I very much enjoy, sweet & sour pork strips, it's #7 in the above menu. It's quite vinegary, with a nice breading. I could eat it all day!



And this is the remains of a nice vegetable dish, swimming in an alcohol sauce. A lot of the dishes here are cooked in Chinese Yellow Alcohol. In small amounts I don't really have an opinion if that's a good or a bad thing. However, in a few of the dishes the Yellow Alcohol taste is overwhelming, and just not to my favor.



Their fried fish with vinegar dish is excellent but very simple, perhaps it's simply too much fried fish with vinegar for only two people. I'd still recommend this dish, but it’s better for groups of four than groups of two.



I tried this straw-mushroom dish because they were sold out of my first choice, but I found it bizarrely bad. It wasn't gross, just the tastes didn't match or amount to anything more than “random ingredients heated in the same pan.”



Finally, they have excellent soups. Their shepherd's purse & tofu soup is my favorite rendition of my favorite soup – with my #2 being the version at Shanghai Restaurant back in Oakland California, ha ha. I also very much like their Hot and Sour soup.



The bill comes to around fourty kuai per person when I go, that's about six dollars. Although the atmosphere is poor and having to wait outside is a pain, especially in the cold Shanghai Winter, I strongly recommend this restaurant.

Lan Xin Restaurant

Lan Xin Restaurant is a Shanghainese Restaurant that I enjoy, but a restaurant I think of as existing in the shadow of Chun, which is practically next door on Jinxian Lu. Like Chun, it's a small, home-style restaurant, turning out authentic tasty versions of the local cuisine in a casual setting. Chun is a little famous for not having a menu – or at the least, every time I've seen Chun mentioned, the no-menu thing gets mentioned as well. Lan Xin has a menu, but it's hand-written, here's a gander at a page:



Lan Xin is a step or two behind Chun in a few regards. The place is small, but doesn't feel charming, just packed. In addition to the main dining area with five tables, there's also a seriously steep flight of stairs that leads to a small room with a couple tables and a couch, it feels like sneaking into someone's private room for a meal.



I think the food, while still very good, is not as good as Chun's. While Chun is consistently excellent in everything it creates, Lan Xin varies. Still, there's a number of dishes that the restaurant is famous for getting right, and these dishes are seen on just about every table. One of these is Hong Shao Rou, a Shanghai specialty of fatty pork with a sweet sauce. Their rendition is on the fatty side, but still probably the best I've ever had. The "red" sauce it's served in is dark to the point of being black.

Another popular dish is Cong Bao Xia Ren. OK, I'm a lazy eater. I don't like spitting out bones, I don't like picking at shrimp shells to get out the meat. These shrimps were very tasty, but small and inconvenient to eat: first bite off the heads, then pop the rest in the mouth, try to chew out the meat, and then spit out the shell.



My favorite vegetable dish there is nothing fancy, but quite nice: Tang Cu Ying Si. It's a lightly pickled mix of a local vegetable, sliced mushroom, and black fungus:



But there's a lot on the menu that I find surprisingly average. Certainly not bad, but not the sort of thing you'd expect to find at a restaurant with a perpetual line. The Tofu and Shepard's Purse Soup, usually a favorite of mine, is oily and not particularly good. And this eggplant, not as spicy as it looks, just wasn't anything to get excited about:



And a quick digression: I've lived in Shanghai for quite some time, and before that I lived in heavily Chinese Downtown Oakland. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about Chinese food, and consequently I snobbishly turn my nose up at certain un-authentic American Chinese restaurants, although I think there are plenty very authentic Chinese restaurants in the US. So what to make of Lan Xin's Gu Lao Pork? It's quite good, but it's coming from almost the exact same playbook as Sweet and Sour Pork, the sort of thing you'd find at Panda Express. It's not quite as tangy, and the meat is of a higher quality than what you'd find there, but it wouldn't raise an eyelid if it was served back at some mall in California, alongside a fortune cookie:



Update 2/25/2009 - Wow, according to Wikipedia, Sweet and Sour Pork is actually the same dish, after being transported to Canton and then California.

One advantage Lan Xin does have over Chun is that it's half the price, bills should come out to around fifty kuai ($7.50) per person, or less. While I think it's possible on some theoretical level to just show up and get in line, I definitely recommend making a reservation first, the phone number is (21)6253-3554.

Unfortunately, there isn't any English at all, and while the staff is friendly, this restaurant will probably be impossible to navigate without at least a little Chinese, or a willingness to point at other people's tables. It's worth trying your luck though. Finally, the address is 130 Jinxian Lu, it's very close to both Chun and the Lomography store. I get there by taking the #1 Subway to Shaanxi Nan Lu station, walking north along Maoming Lu for five or ten minutes, and then taking a left at Jinxian Lu. It's right near the corner.

Xiao Bai Hua

Xiao Bai Hua is a Shanghainese restaurant near Xujiahui, a big shopping mall of a district. It's become one of my stand-by places when I go out for a fun meal with friends, because it's good food, not terribly expensive (even by Chinese standards), at a cool location, and has a fun, casual atmosphere. The insides are clean, brightly lit, and whimsically decorated, and it feels something like dining in a home:



I first heard about the restaurant off the yelp-like dianping.com, where I looked up, uhh, fish-head soup. That brings up images of a soup-pot full of fish heads, but here it's just a slightly creamy, well-flavored soup with an entire fish inside of it. The fish gets cleaned of the offal, but the head is left on – diners can just choose not to eat that part. The soup is excellent, and I get it almost every time I go to the restaurant. It's 88 kuai (about twelve dollars) for a bowl, but there's enough soup that two or three people could make their entire dinner out of it.



There's a very extensive menu full of Shanghai specialties, with an emphasis on seafoods. The menu is fully translated into English, and it's all very good, although I don’t quite think it rises up to the level of the soup, or of Chun, for that matter. The prices are decent, generally 20-40 kuai for a dish, and I usually end up spending about fifty kuai per person when I go. Here’s another picture of their food, again with the soup:



The restaurant is a little tricky to find the first time. I take the subway to Xujiahui, and then the #12 exit, across the street from Best Buy. It's a five or ten minute walk down Zhaojiabang Lu, past the park, to Wanping Lu, where I cross the street and take a left. Half a block down, on the right, is an alleyway, the address is 299 Wanping Lu, and the building is #3. There's a pink sign.



It's hard to pass by at night, because it's lit up like a Christmas tree!



It's a good idea to make a reservation if going at peak times, sometimes there'll be a short wait. The phone number is 21-6472-1867.

Chun - A Shanghainese Restaurant

This will be the first post in a series about favorite Shanghai-style restaurants. That's in addition to my series about the best places to get xiaolongbao, a local-style snack.

Shanghai's cuisine is not my favorite. I prefer the stronger flavors of South East Asian cuisine, or maybe the hot, oily Sichuan and Hunan styles of Chinese food. Shanghai style food relies on subtle flavors, where quality comes from the fresh ingredients. There's less oil than other Chinese cuisines, with foods often being steamed, rather than fried in a wok. Local seafood is prevalent, as is local produce – farms still line the outskirts of Shanghai. Sauces are mild, often depending on interplay of light soy sauce and sugar – really a lot of Shanghai's food is mildly sweet, and that's probably the biggest hurdle for someone new to the cuisine.

That being said, probably my favorite place in Shanghai for local-style cuisine is Chun, on 124 Jinxian Lu, right next to the Lomography store and nearish to the Shaanxi Nan Lu Subway Station. The restaurant has only four tables, between that and a NY Times write up it all sounded very mysterious. But really the insides are nothing special – it looks like a normal hole in the wall, only maybe just a little fancier and a little smaller. Also, with such a small restaurant, it's a good idea either show up really early, or better yet to book a table, the number is 21-6256-0301.



There's no menu. Instead, the chef prepares what's fresh that day – customers tell the waiter how many dishes they want. Of course there's some leeway to order favorite dishes, or to request certain foods not be served. The waiter only speaks Chinese, but the restaurant is well-known enough with foreigners that I'm sure it's possible to order without the local lingo.

All the pictures above have been taken at the restaurant, and they were all incredibly delicious, to the point that it was hard to choose a favorite or least favorite dish. If there are any caveats to be made, it's that the food is served local style, and personally I'm so lazy at eating, I hate spitting out bones, or digging the meat out of shrimps.



What was shown? The pictures were taken at a meal for two, where we got a cold braised pork, a plate of seasoned shrimp, a steamed whitefish with a hong shao sauce, and pork soup with bamboo shoots and those crazy tofu sheets that are tied into knots. A lot of food, although I should have added a vegetable. It came in to slightly under 200 kuai, or about $14 per person. About double the price from some of my other favorite Shanghai-style restaurants, but you pay the big bucks to get the best!