Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

I arrived in Shanghai, quite by chance, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. In the United States, news of APEC generated the excitement of a tristate trade fair, but Shanghai was tingling. Two million pots of flowers and 7,500 trees had been planted along roads and in parks. American president George Bush showed up, and his scheduling people had already referred to one event as a “Chinese fire drill,” but the Chinese were so pleased he’d come nobody became testy at the affront. He was reportedly eating room-service burgers after a tentative and unsuccessful foray into Chinese cuisine.

Westernized food can be found throughout Shanghai, mostly at Starbucks, KFC, and McDonald’s, which have become almost as commonplace as stands selling pan-fried juicy buns, the justifiably beloved street food of Shanghai. A vigilantly patrolled, carefully regulated, painstakingly restored outdoor complex called Xintiandi is Shanghai’s showplace of Occidental restaurants, bars, and shops. The first time I walked into Xintiandi—famous as the site of the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party—a very efficient loudspeaker system was sere-nading visitors with Sister Sledge singing “We Are Family.” F O R K I T O V E R

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My first meal there was at Luna, which serves disastrously bad mid-dlebrow Italian fare; its chorizo-and-chicken-liver linguine with a creamy meat sauce might be the worst Italian dish ever conceptualized. The jarringly chic T8 features an eclectic fusion menu; its sautéed mushrooms with shaved Parmesan and asparagus on “charred sourdough” came on bread so badly burned it was inedible. After those two meals, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I was that the “authentic Bavarian microbrewery and restaurant” about to open in Xintiandi was still weeks away.

My next Western-style meal was at M on the Bund, located a few floors up in one of the gorgeous early-twentieth-century buildings built by the British during their enslavement of Shanghai. The Bund is the embankment of the Huangpu, and the view from M on the Bund’s open terrace across the river to the towers of Pudong is mesmerizing. Unfortunately, the food is not.

We arrived twenty minutes late for a six p.m. reservation and were informed that our table would be needed at eight p.m. I felt right at home, since this is how diners are treated in New York. Service was a disconcerting amalgam of fawning servitude and the bum’s rush. The low-ceilinged main dining room, minimally decorated with a Chinese screen and a few Art Deco touches, was crammed with undersized tables so close together only the whisper-thin Chinese waiters could comfortably squeeze through. I shimmied sideways to get by. The “famous slowly baked salt-encased selected leg of lamb” was dry. Roast duck came with a sauce so sweet I regretted not having ordered this dish for dessert.

I tried two renowned Chinese restaurants that have received considerable attention because of how beautifully they are thought to cater to the needs of tourists. I found 1221 at the end of an alley. The background music was Mexican, and further noise was provided by a loud Brit on a cell phone. In keeping with the restaurant’s reputation for coddling round-eyes like me, my waitress refused to let me order anything interesting. The sweet-and-sour pork was Manhattan takeout. Garlic shrimp was so tame an American friend eating with me happily compared it to the Red Lobster’s popcorn shrimp. (He loves Red Lobster.) 1 7 0

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Service was excruciatingly slow. Although the waitresses dressed like ninjas, in black outfits with red sashes, they didn’t move like ninjas.

Club Jin Mao is the premier restaurant of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, which is in Pudong’s Jin Mao Tower. It is located eighty-eight stories up, but the too-small windows are protected by steel grids, and looking out the windows is like peering from the cockpit of a DC-3. The tables are large and set with flowerless orchids. Napkins wrapped with tasseled cords are the only opulent touch. An optimist might find the Club Jin Mao understated. I found it cold.

My meal began with marinated peanuts, a standard Shanghai snack.

These were superb, which was fortunate. My friend and I ate three bowls while waiting one hour for any of the food we had ordered to appear. At one point we stared longingly at the remains of a huge, slug-like sea cucumber ordered by businessmen at a nearby table. A man has to be ravenous to covet sea cucumber, a repellent creature that should be beaten with sticks and driven back into the ocean whenever it finds its way ashore.

We had, as the menu described it, stewed fillet of Yangtze River fish with sliced chicken and ham in a hot-and-sour sauce. It turned out to be little more than a bowl of hot-and-sour soup. I asked our waitress to point out the chicken. “It’s in the soup,” she said. I asked our waitress to point out the ham. “Sorry, we have no ham,” she said.

The crispy duck wasn’t crispy. The soup buns stuck to the bottom of the steamer, so when I tried to lift them out, they tore and the soup leaked out. The turnip cakes were perfect. I am a huge admirer of Shanghai turnip cakes, which have flaky shortbread crusts and are stuffed with a turnip filling so savory it could pass for meat. As fine as these were, they did not save the meal.

It was no surprise to me that the most satisfying dining in Shanghai turned out to be at traditional Chinese restaurants operated by Chinese. A reality of culinary development in international cities is that any restaurants that are not of local character need to arise naturally from the needs of a thriving immigrant community. Shanghai does not have that any longer. Back in the 1930s, when Shanghai was F O R K I T O V E R

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dominated by international settlements, it