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

offended. “How can we receive education from the peasants? I picked up pig manure. While I am there, I am not allowed to read. It was not allowed. It was all a waste of our time.” She is a neat, trim woman in her seventies who came to dinner impeccably dressed in a brown blazer and camel-colored slacks. She wore a diamond pin from the thirties, or at least an excellent costume-jewelry replica of one, and appeared to have stepped out of a black-and-white movie, until I saw her hands. Under the fingernails of the thumb and first finger of her right hand was a fungus growth she picked up working in those fields.

Hairy crabs, which were in season, are taken apart with exquisite care in a formalized eating ritual that makes the banging and smashing of 1 7 4

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Maryland’s hard-shell varieties seem primitive. The result, in both locales, is a few bites of delicate lumps of meat, but the Chinese are more moved by the experience. They prize their crabs so highly they extol them in poetry (“Chrysanthemum glows in yellow blossoms and crabs are prime”).

I chomped on my pair, one male and one female, liking the roe in the more exalted female but not overcome. Hui, a person of subtlety, ate one of hers with care and wrapped up the second to take home.

A few days later I walked into a small Taiwanese spot called the Bellagio Cafe, expecting little. The prosperous, sophisticated Taiwanese consider their cuisine rarefied and elegant. I consider it worrisome, because dried squid and similar subspecies are always appearing in their dishes. I ate a modest lunch, and it was a revelation.

A dish called Garlic Explosion Shrimp, which consisted of heads-on shrimp buried in a mountain of bread crumbs seasoned with garlic, chili peppers, and bits of dried fruit was the most compelling food I ate in Shanghai. I rated the Bellagio Cafe’s steamed pork dumplings unbeatable until I sampled the pan-fried ones, which were even better.

The restaurant seemed too trendy, too throbbing with music, too filled with young people in black T-shirts to be so concerned with food.

The tables and chairs could have come from SoHo—they had fake-marble tops, aluminum arms, plastic seats. The waitresses were short women with short hair dressed in black-and-white schoolgirl uniforms.

The owner, Claire Lee, at first refused to speak to me. “I don’t know how to answer questions. My English is not good enough. Maybe you come back in a half year.” I explained how inconvenient that would be. She told me all the famous restaurants in Shanghai were the big restaurants and I should talk to those owners because they knew something about running a restaurant and she did not. I praised her cooking, and she replied that she didn’t know how to cook; she hired somebody to do it for her. “When I told my officemates at China Airlines I was coming to Shanghai to open a restaurant, they said, ‘You can only cook tomatoes and fried eggs and you are going to Shanghai to open a restaurant? You should be ashamed.’ ” Lee is a small woman who walks stooped, which makes her seem F O R K I T O V E R

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unimposing, something she is not. The waitresses are munchkin versions of her, but she claims the intention was not to impersonate herself but to create a staff of women whom customers would enjoy but not lure away. Her brother Jimmy, who is one of her partners, explained.

“This is an important concept in China. If you want waitresses, they must not be beautiful or ugly. You must have them in the middle. They cannot be ugly, because you must provide customers something for their eyes to enjoy. But if I am a rich man who comes in here and sees a beautiful waitress, I ask her how much she earns per month.” Added Claire, “I don’t think a beautiful girl stays here long.” Bellagio Cafe has twenty-two tables, miniature for Shanghai, but it is open from eleven a.m. until four a.m. and the tables are turned, in restaurant parlance, nine times. I had five meals there, but often it was only a tuna sandwich. Americans occasionally require tuna with mayo on white bread, even amid the bounty of Shanghai.

I came upon remnants of old Shanghai by following the laundry. Near a few undistinguished streets, wash hung in alleyways or dangled from trees. I found these neighborhoods irresistible. I suppose those who mourn the passing of old Shanghai should be considered no more than sentimental wretches. I count myself among them.

Here I would find pan-fried soup buns offered for pennies apiece.

The shops along these lanes are family run, or so they appear, and offer multiple services. My favorite combined bicycle repairs and unrefrigerated farm-fresh eggs. I regularly saw people walking about in paja-mas because their only set of clothes was hanging out to dry.

Rickshaws no longer roam the streets, and at one time eighty thousand rickshaw pullers worked in Shanghai. Bicycles, including Shanghai’s legendary Forever brand, are abundant, but Wing told me he expected bicycles to be gone from the streets within five years, supplanted by motorbikes. In restaurants women still place their purses on the seats of their chairs, leaning back against them, rather than on the floor. This is more out of habit than necessity, because the tradition of spitting in dining establishments is fading away.

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My hotel was situated in the old French Concession, a remnant of the era when the Europeans bent Shanghai to their will. I came upon little that was remindful of those days, although a remarkable exception was the Old China Hand Reading Room, a dark, quaint, and curious retreat resembling the parlor of a grandmother who never airs out her house. I ordered a