纸锅鱿鱼 Paper Pot Spicy Squid

Pinyin: Zhǐ Guō Yóu Yú

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning." If this is you, you'll get a kick out of this dish. From above it looks like an unassuming dish of food, but what you can't see is the plate of napalm sitting underneath it.

Almost every time I go for dinner at a decent to good restaurant in Shanghai I end up with fire on the table. It seems to be quite the norm that the primary dish on the table is being heated/cooked while it's on the table.

This one is some spicy squid in a paper pot (i.e. the white accordion looking thing). I believe it's a Hunan style dish, and frankly it's pretty damn good. I'm a huge fan of squid and octopus in all its forms.

On a side note though one time I was eating some squid I chomped down on a tiny tiny piece of the beak of the squid and crack goes my tooth. After several trips to the dentist, a lot of drilling, and a fair bit of pain, I now have a gold crown on that tooth!