NakedSushi

Whenever I talk about The Motherland aka China, I almost always have to mention the fantastic food there. The food usually isn’t fancy, but what makes it great is that it’s simple and fresh. Here in the US, we get stuck with several day old, tasteless vegetables, but in Shanghai the markets are stocked full of vegetables fresh picked from nearby farms and trucked in during the wee hours of the morning.


Bibimbap was one of the meals served on the plane. Obviously, it wasn’t served in the traditional blazingly hot stone bowl that makes the rice all crispy, but it was a decent plane meal nonetheless.

I went to my 2nd uncle’s house the first night we arrived to have dinner. A bunch of the family was packed around the tiny dining table and the amount of food nearly broke the table. Okay, maybe not quite, but I was amazed when my uncle whipped out plate after plate of his creation. He even made the BF several plates of vegan goodies.

As part of dessert, my uncle carved these little pumpkins and stuffed the inside with a sweet egg-yolk based paste. It was a bit too rich, so I couldn’t eat too much of it. Besides, by that time I was way past stuffed.

One can’t visit Shanghai without visiting the restaurant famed for its xiao long baos. Nanxiang Mantou Dian (Nanxiang Bun Restaurant) is known as the birthplace of xlbs and while theres are great, there certainly are other places that are cheaper and have better. Nanxiang’s has a variety of xlbs including ones with shrimp, crab, regular pork, and even a vegan version where the soupy part that drips out is made from agar and mushroom broth.

I got to the restaurant at its peak time, which meant the crowds were almost unbearable. The take-out line was endless. I wanted to sit down, so I went inside the restaurant. The first floor was packed with people and it was a seat-yourself situation. I wasn’t about to fight with 50 other Chinese people to get empty seats and then try to gain the servers’ attention, so I went up a floor.

Going up a floor means that you pay twice as much for your meal as the people on the first floor. I was hoping this would deter some people, but the 2nd floor was just as bad. Okay, next floor time. The third floor is the most expensive floor but it also has the most variety of food. The first two floors only have xlbs and buns. The third floor is a fully-functional restaurant with soup and everything.

There were two sections on the third floor: the regular order off the menu section, and the high-rollers section. Despite the third floor being the most expensive, there was still a line. I waited in the line for ten minutes or so, and then a waiter asked if I wanted to go sit in the high-rollers section. Hungry and frustrated with the crowds, I agreed.

The high-rollers section is called that because in order to sit there, you have to order at least 120RMB worth of food per person. Thanks to the US currency exchange rate, that didn’t break the bank too much. It was worth the money just to sit in a quieter area where people aren’t breathing down your necks trying to get you to finish eating quickly so they could take your seats.

One afternoon, my cousin took us to a fancy tea house in Pudong. The place is sectioned off into semi-private rooms so that people could talk business. The tea was only mediocre, but the prices were pretty outrageous. It was a bit silly that everyone had to order their own tea set-up. At least there was a buffet included in the price. Like the tea, the food there was only okay.

Many people in Shanghai buy groceries in markets like this. The food here is always fresh since it’s trucked in in the morning. This one of the cleaner open-air markets in Shanghai. The markets also have meat, which I guess is fresh, but I always wonder how fresh they can keep the meat without any sign of refrigeration. Sometimes there are fish packed on top of ice, but most of the meat, except for the live stuff like eels, are just hanging around waiting to be bought.

I went to my big uncle’s apartment for lunch one day and he warned me that he wasn’t as good of a cook as my 2nd uncle and that the meal would be simple. We went to the market beforehand to pick out some veggies to cook as well as pick up some already-prepared food. The dishes were simple, but everything tasted great. Especially the sugar snap peas and the nien gao. I already miss the fresh nien gao in Shanghai. The supermarket stuff in the US is so hard and crappy compared to the fresh ones.

This was what I had for breakfast my first morning in Wuyi mountain. I was walking outside of the hotel, starving, when one of the restaurant owners beckoned me to sit at her restaurant and eat. Lucky for her I was in the mood for porridge. I had never had pumpkin porridge before but I think I like it. It’s refreshing and simple, which makes it easy to eat for breakfast. It also came with a side of picked vegetables, which were a bit more spicey than I’d like to be eating so early in the day.

For lunch, I asked our taxi driver to take us to a decent local restaurant. He brought us to one on the outskirts of the tourist strip of town, close to the road before finally making it into the mountains. The restaurant’s bathroom was one of the more disgusting ones I’ve seen but I’m glad that didn’t scare me away.

The cooks were pretty accommodating and cooked up some hand-made noodles in a veggie broth for the BF. I think he liked it, but he looked jealous about the amount of spice they put in my broth versus the amount of spice they put in his.

My noodles were delicious, but a lot more spicy than I expected. When the waitress asked if I could eat spicy stuff, I said, “just a little.” It scares me that this is their version of a mild beef noodle. The next day, our driver joined us for lunch and got the spicy version and even he was sweating a little after that. I guess people in Wuyi mountain really like their spicy food.

We also ordered a plate of stir-fried eggplant. These were the best eggplants I’ve ever had. They seemed to have just been tossed together with some red peppers and green peppers, but the flavor was great. The green peppers gave a nice smoky taste to the eggplants. I liked how the eggplants themselves were tender without being mushy or soaked in oil.

Being gluttons, we also ordered a bun because the table next door had some. It was a veggie bun, but it wasn’t a veggie bun I was expecting. I thought it would have the typical greens, mushrooms and baked tofu inside. Instead, it was stuffed with thin strips of flavorful taro. This was also spicy.

The next day, we returned to the same restaurant. I had them fry up some noodles this time and they were just as good as the soup noodles. The lady at the restaurant recommended I try their mi fun, rice noodles. I’m usually not a big fan of thick round rice noodles, but these were great. They had just the right amount of chewiness.

I also ordered fried dumplings, fried long beans and kong shing tsai or ong choy to some people. All were delicious, especially the fried dumplings. I was sorry I couldn’t finish them while they were still hot, but I packed them up in a take-out container just in case I got hungry later.

During our days in Shanghai, we usually had dofu hua or dou jiang at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant across the street from our hotel. Our first morning in Shanghai, we walked all over the place looking for dofu hua and somehow missed this place. Luckily, we found it a few days later.

Their dofu hua was so soft and fresh I felt like I was eating pudding. What made it even better was the fresh you tiao that we ordered along with it. Their dou jiang wasn’t bad either, but I preferred the sweet one to the salty one. The salty dofu hua and dou jiangs were a tad too salty and spicy for me. The sweet ones were just right. On most mornings, I also ordered a fan gao, or a deep fried rice patty that looks like a hashbrown, with my breakfast.

We eventually made it to Gong de Lin (aka Godly), which is a famous vegan restaurant in Shanghai. Located on west Nanjing road, I knew that it was going to be fancy, since that’s where all the expensive stores and restaurants were.

We were overwhelmed with the menu, so we just ordered a set dinner which comes with soups, main courses, and dessert. The food was kind of disappointing. It wasn’t any different than what we could get at a veggie Chinese place in the states. The only thing that stood out was the crab gao dish, which even came in a little crab-shaped dish.

Chinese wedding receptions are multi-course affairs, so I was excited about all the delicious food I was about to eat. Unfortunately, since the BF and I were playing the part of ban niang/ban lang which is kind of like the bridesmaid and best man, we didn’t get to eat much because we were following the bride and groom around the room and toasting people.
At least I got to try some of the lobster dish. Instead of eating just a whole lobster, the dish had bite-sized pieces of lobster and some sort of pasta sitting in a rich creamy lobster sauce. The dish almost had a western flare to it.

There was also a crab dish that came after, but by the time I had time to sit down and sample it, it was gone. Most of the dishes were empty by the time I finally sat down to eat, but at least there was still red-bean soup. There’s something nice and calming about a bowl of sweet red-bean soup to end the night.