This dish was a calculated risk and I gotta say we came out on the losing side. My interest was piqued and then the waitress told me that the brown sauce was chocolate I couldn’t resist. I wanted to know how scrambled egg, meat flosh, cucumber, and chocolate combined to make a sushi like appetizer. The answer unsurprisingly was not very well at all. Meat floss in any dish is always a bit awkward, it’s a bit sweet, but also a bit savory, it’s meat but doesn’t feel like meat, very strange stuff indeed. It wasn’t helped at all by the chocolate.

No worries though for the average diner, I’m guessing that only this one tucked away restaurant in Jing’An District in Shanghai serves this dish. The real moral of this story is that you should try new and interesting things, including food, even when they might not seem all that great. There’s always a chance you’ll be pleasantly surprised. This wasn’t one of them, but maybe I’ll have better luck next time.

I’ve raved and raved about tofu before, so it should be obvious that I dig it. I know lots of people say they don’t like tofu but seriously there are hundreds of kinds of tofu out there, something for everyone so to speak.

The smoked tofu in this dish has a unique flavor, earthy and wooden, it reminds me of a deep dark dank forest which is a pretty unique flavor. A fair number of spicy peppers were added that give it a bit of bite, and like all good Chinese dishes a fair variety of vegetables and a few mushrooms were added for good measure.

I believe this is a Hunan style dish and is common throughout those Chinese restaurants here in Shanghai. Smoked tofu can be found in a number of dishes, again primarily coming from Hunan province or nearby areas. It’s a unique flavor and might not be for everyone, but it’s different and worth trying at least once.

I love octopus and this was a surprisingly great dish. It was sweet but not startling sweet like your average sweet and sour dish, and it wasn’t sour it was spicy and balanced nicely against the sweetness.

The chef added sauteed onions which I always love and add great flavor. Also added were mushrooms of varying varieties that are another one of my favorites. Me and my dining partner were both sort of surprised that the octopus in the dish were absolutley huge and you can see that in the picture here to some extent. Normally baby octopus are used and generally fit in your mouth in just a single bite, not the case here each piece was several bites.

As a fan of octopus I had to give this dish a try and I wasn’t disappointed. The flavours were unique and fit my palate quite well. I think most people would like this dish once they get past the slightly odd sight of seeing tentacles in their food, which if you’ve been in China for any amount of time shouldn’t be too hard.

Something a bit different today. A little Dim Sum. Dim Sum as Americans know it, is more of a Cantonese style food. Dim Sum is essentially the Chinese equivalent to finger food and it’s usually eaten while drinking tea. Lots of time the dishes are sweet and dessert like in nature, although that’s obviously not always the case.

These steamed dumplings are filled with a mixture of pork and crab meat (which means they are salty/savory rather than sweet). I’m not usually one for liking crab, but I do like Dim Sum. Since I don’t much care for crab I couldn’t say I loved the taste of these little dumplings. The crab flavor was quite strong, the outer noodle shell was nice, not too chewy, yet it didn’t just fall apart. And the little orange red things on top were just for looks essentially.

I’d definitely recommend trying some Dim Sum while your in China, there are tons of options available. For me I won’t be getting these crab dumplings again, but hey if you enjoy crab, more power to you.

A dish fit for a man. Meat and bones greasy and fried, not much in the way of spices or strange flavors, just meat and grease.

I’ve never had braised pork spine before, it seems as though it’s a lot like pork ribs, but more difficult to eat. Trying to dig in to the corners and crevices while keeping the cheeks clean was basically impossible. After the fact I’m not really sure that you could give the bones to a dog but I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

The only real complaint I had was that it was a bit greasy, overall the dish was just OK, nothing to rave about.

Sorry for the strangely colored picture, the dish looks much better in real life. This is one time where the beef in China isn’t so bad. In general the beef dishes suffer from extremely poor quality beef that has been soaked in far too much tenderizer which I’ve complained about before.

This dish on the other hand contains decent quality meat that is fairly lean and not too chewy. It’s a spicy appetizer that feels very fresh on the tongue. The spiciness real bites at your mouth, but the cilantro just makes it feel so nice and clean. The peanuts add a little crunchiness and manage to mask the spiciness.

This is really a great way to open up a meal. The explosive pepper flavors open up your eyes and really get you craving relief from what is to come, yet all that meat feels so good in the mouth you’ve got to keep going back for more.

Visually it’s hard to get a feel for what is going on here, so let me explain. The rectangular block shaped things are a sort of rice noodle called nian gao, they remind me of rice dumplings. There are also bits of baby octopus, some peppers, scallions and a few other minor ingredients. The whole dish is cooked in a thick sweet brown sauce reminiscent of teriyaki sauce.

It’s classic Shanghai style cooking. The rice noodles, the seafood, and the thick sweet brown sauce are all commonly associated with Shanghai style food. The combination works very well together, the sweetness of the sauce is counterbalanced by the thick noodles which also provide some unique texture while the octopus adds that seafood flavor and a meaty texture.

A real surprise find for me and I’ll be searching out dishes of this nature in the future. I’d like to find more options with those rice noodles and I’m always a sucker for something sweet.

I saw this dish on a table next to mine when I walked in to this restaurant and it looked great. I’m a fan of peanuts, and I saw it had carrots and cucumbers, tofu, meat, and more. I had to have it. Come to find out this dish is actually called the Eight Treasures Dish. It has everything mentioned above as well as mushrooms, peppers, and peas.

It really reminded me a lot of Kung Pao Chicken, of which I am a huge fan, but with more variety. My hopes were dashed though upon the first bite. The dish was quite oily and the sauce was very dark and heavy feeling. It was a bit saltier than I would have liked even though the overall flavor was good.

I had such high hopes and like so many things in China those hopes were dashed. I still think that this dish has great potential if it was done right. Given the right restaurant I’d try this one again, though I think most of the cheap local places would abuse this by over oiling it, so be warned.

God how I used to hate seafood. Crab would just about make me sick and clams, muscles, oysters were all too disgusting to actually eat. Fish was only OK as long as it wasn’t too “fishy” tasting. But my oh my how things have changed since living in Shanghai. Seafood is amazing. All those little hardshell things like the clams and muscles and oysters are great. Shrimp are to die for, lobster is incredible, and just about every fish imaginable is excellent, cooked or not.

This seafood soy milk hotpot mixture was pretty tasty. Lots of good seafood, though not enough shrimp in my opinion, though one can never really have enough shrimp. The clams were a little chewy though so that was a real drawback, they obviously used cheap seafood as opposed to good seafood. But there was also tofu to be had aplenty and tofu is another one of those things that I’ve come to love in Shanghai.

There wasn’t anything over the top about this soup it just worked out to be a good combination of seafood and tofu. Interestingly the soup was made from soy milk though that didn’t affect the taste one way or the other, it just made the soup look a bit cloudy. I’d really like to see how another restaurant pulls off this dish. I won’t be so inclined to order it again from this place, but I think the idea has potential.

It’s November now and this dish really hit the spot. It’s a combination of spring bamboo, mushrooms and assorted vegetables served in a bowl of some of the tastiest chicken broth I’ve had in a good long time. It really brought back memories of mom’s home cooking after a long cold day of playing outside.

Real authentic Chinese food is sometimes so dangerous as it more often than not brings fire to the table in the form of a small plate of napalm underneath a bowl of food, as was the case with this dish, but it’s also great to know that the food will be hot until you finish eating it. Somehow I can’t really see this style of cooking going over well in the all too paranoid safety conscious American society, but I’m certainly going to enjoy it over here.

I will certainly be hunting this dish down again, and it’s simple enough and tasty enough that I might even give it a try in my own kitchen.

The first smell and first bite of this dish were quite amazing. The cabbage was cooked but still crunchy and best of all it was coated in lovely tasty bacon grease. The pieces of bacon were a nice touch and gave me something to look forward to. In fact this dish was a surprising treat and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One thing to remember about this dish however is that once it becomes cold it just ain’t as good.

A common street food in Shanghai that you may not be able to see, but you can certainly smell from a mile away. The premise behind the dish is that the tofu has been aged much like say brie cheese. The moldy tofu is then deep fried and served. Dipping sauce, almost always spicy and often times sweet is provided. When served on the street it cost a couple of Kuai for about four pieces, restaurants are of course more expensive.

The key to this dish lies in the name though, because it is stinky, stinky and nasty smelling is more accurate. Think rotting gym socks, or boiling sewage, or very strong well aged cheese. If you aren’t careful and can ruin your appetite. Shanghai locals rave over the stuff, in my opinion it’s just OK. If you are in Shanghai it’s a must at least once, but eat it fast and then get it off the table so you can enjoy the rest of your meal.

Pure ecstasy on a stick. Nice large whole tiger prawns that have been roasted on a stick while being bathed in sweet and sour sauce composed of tomatoes, pineapples and various other delicious spices in a very Yunnan food style makes my mouth water just thinking about it. The waiter brought out a dozen of them and I could hardly control myself knowing that six of those juicy morsels were mine.

The tangy flavors in the sauce hit the pallet wonderfully as you were tearing their heads off with your teeth. Interestingly enough you just eat the skin rather than spitting that part out. Just chew thoroughly, it ends up being way easier and tastier than de-skinning them. If shrimp is your thing, and you crave sweet and sour, it’s totally impossible to go wrong with this dish.

Bamboo is such a very Chinese thing, from pandas to chopsticks it seems as though everything can be made from bamboo. There are a thousand different ways to eat bamboo, but this slow cooked bamboo with duck is one of the best I’ve discovered. The aroma is full flavored with hints of savory duck wafting up from the steam. The bamboo is soft yet still crunchy making it just the perfect texture to satisfy. The broth itself is sweet yet salty and bursting with flavors from the duck and bamboo. This dish is special, it must be simmered for long hours before ripening, but it is worth the effort. Find a local Yunnan style restaurant and be sure to give this dish a try, your taste buds will thank you.

Startling in its appearance I was surprised that this dish actually tasted not bad. Warning bells usually go off in my head when people start talking about eating internal organs, but I’ll give most things a try. The meat was actually served chilled, not just room temperature and soy sauce was provided for dipping. The meat was tender albeit the texture was a bit odd, but it tasted clean, a little like ham but definitely not overwhelming. I kept going back for more throughout the meal as it provided some nice contrast to the other dishes. I can’t say I’d recommend it, but I wouldn’t avoid it either.

Peanuts a simple food, yet add some spicy oil and a dash of dried fish and you’ve created a rather tasty Chinese appetizer. The spicy oil added most of the flavor and I’d swear they mixed in a fair bit of white pepper that really livened up the first dish on the table. The peanuts were roasted till they were crunchier than normal which I’ve become a fond of. As with any dish involving lots of peanuts it always goes better with beer and I think that is doubly true for this one since you’ll want something to quench that burning sensation tingling your mouth alive.

Chances are you’ll only find this at a Hunan food restaurant obviously enough, though it is very similar to 家常豆腐 Homestyle Tofu, which I previously talked about. In the Hunan style though this dish is focused more on being spicy and less on variety of ingredients.

You can see that it is quite simply pieces of tofu, peppers, scallions and you can’t see that they’ve also added pieces of pork fat for flavor. The tofu used as the primary ingredient is quite unique in flavor. It really reminds me of fermented tofu. It has some earthy undertones about it that lead me to believe it isn’t fresh. It also has a slightly tough and chewy skin that appears as though it was fried. It adds nicely to the texture but at the same time the tofu isn’t oily.

The spiciness from the peppers isn’t overpowering, they provide just enough strength to tingle your sense but not enough to have you reaching for a cold drink. Together with the peppers and the fat from the pork this tofu comes alive and I’ve been regularly ordering it for the past several weeks.

A classic Shanghainese style dish. Tofu, and a green vegetable minced together, throw in a bit of sesame oil, and presto, a pretty decent vegetarian dish is created.

Every time I’ve had this it’s always been served cold, and is one of the first things out on the table. Also most of the time they serve it molded into some shape, either a cup or some fancy bowl.

It’s quite a kick to actually watch somebody mince vegetables. I’ve often seen young chefs standing outside of a restaurant with a big plastic bowl full of vegetables and two butcher knifes just whacking away at the vegetables in the bowl. Seems to work better than a blender, lol.

Oh ya BTW, this is one of the few vegetables I haven’t figured out the English name for. It’s something that’s native to Shanghai, but that’s about everything I know about it.

This is pretty much a classic dish that you’ll find on both sides of the pacific. It’s a pretty common dish in China and nearly every American Chinese restaurant in the USA has a similar dish. And by similar I mean pretty damn close to the exact same.

You know the dish, tofu, egg, pieces of beef, etc. I won’t go into much more detail than that.

I’ve been on a hiatus lately but I’m gonna try to be a bit more regular, and not just in my posts. Gotta eat that fiber. Chinese New Year was a bit disruptive and then that damn job thing got in the way.

It seems as though more often than not when you go to eat out in China you also have to do at least a little cooking. Case in point is this dish of Yunnan Rice Noodles. The waitress brings around a tray of food stuffs as you can see in the picture, and soon follows up with a bowl of nearly boiling broth and noodles. The responsibility is yours to put all the stuff into the nearly boiling broth. Including a quail egg, a slice of raw fish, a small piece of mostly cooked chicken and a variety of other things. It’s important to move quick here and get the egg and raw fish into the broth quickly so that they have sufficient time and heat to properly cook.

After everything is in the soup, the real enjoyment can begin. By the time you put everything in the soup and convince the waitress to take away the empty trays, everything inside the soup is cooked and you can begin eating. You not to soft and not to firm, and there is a variety of goods in the soup. The brot won’t be disappointed. The noodles are done just righth is a slightly salty yet ever so tasty chicken stock with undoubtedly a month’s worth of MSG, but such is the price one must pay for that salty deliciousness.

Price is not bad either. Depending on the tray of goodies to throw in with the noodles a serving will run between 15 and 30 RMB. I don’t actually remember the price I paid but it wasn’t outrageous. One of these restaurants exists near the top of Grand Gateway Mall in Xujiahui and another resides in the basement of Raffle’s City. It’s a chain, but I haven’t found any other place to get Yunnan style food in Shanghai.