Shanghai Senses: Tastes & Smells
An Introduction to Shanghai Cuisine
By Olivia Wu
Shanghai is a wide-open diner's paradise, a 21st century megalopolis where you can find traditional Chinese flavors to contemporary, experimental Western cuisine. Here, you can order from the most refined menus of shark's fin and abalone alongside a wine list of Lafite and Montrachet, or standing on a noisy sidewalk dipping a piece of deep-fried stinky tofu into a plastic tub of chile sauce.
Anything—and everything—goes. But the secret to dining well in this futuristic, cosmopolitan city is to remember that most of its cooks and products still come from the surrounding towns in the Yangtze River delta: Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Ningbo, Nanjing. Seafood as well as freshwater fin- and shellfish, and vegetables grown in rich soil, are often heightened by soy sauce, rice wine from Shaoxing, and touched with a pinch of sugar, to unveil their natural freshness. Drunken chicken, smoked fish, river eels, duck and ham slow-braised are classic dishes. Then there is fresh bamboo, different in each season, as well as the salted and cured bianjian. Beginning in the late fall, comes the harvest of the local freshwater "hairy" crab, maoxie, most commonly steamed and served with the local inky brown vinegar from nearby Zhenjiang.
Perhaps the food that best expresses Shanghai are the soup dumplings (tangbao, or xiaolong bao). In this round sachet of perfect pasty, one mouthful contains the full experience: rich, hand-minced pork, an explosion of liquid soup wrapped in the silk-thin negligee of pastry. It expresses refinement and excess at the same time.
A writer, journalist, and entrepreneur in food, Olivia Wu is an Executive Chef at Google. Prior to that, she was a staff reporter for the SF Chronicle’s food and wine section. In 2006, she was on assignment in Shanghai and blogged about her experiences. You can read her Shanghai Diary here.
