Lingbo Li
The Best Hairy Crab Roe in Shanghai, or, a Shanghai Dining Editor’s Must Eats List
Back during my tony days interning at City Weekend Shanghai, the benevolent dining and health editor would spit out recommendations with the efficiency of a finely tuned machine. I recently asked her for some recommendations for a friend in Shanghai, and I wished I had had this list when I was there. So in case you ever make your way to the Middle Kingdom’s most cosmopolitan city, consult this guide for what you should be inhaling.
Don’t forget these babies, the best breakfast crepes ever, on Mudan Lu, close to Pujian Lu.
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Joanne Yao, City Weekend Dining Editor’s Must Eats List
Vegetarian – Wu Guan Tang (try the carrot and potato faux crab roe, it’s amazing; the bags of fortune for a milder palate, the 8-plate appetizer set if you’re with lots of people, and knife-cut spicy mushroom noodles).
The crab place – must tries here are the dan dan crab noodles and the “yin-yang” pastries in the dim sum section (they’re fried halves of yummy glutinous rice, one stuffed with curried crab the other with lotus paste). They also have normal food (non-crab) too, if you’re on a budget.
for photos: http://www.dianping.com/shop/2093833
Cute cafes with actual good coffee have been popping up all over the place lately, so for coffeehouses, check out the last dining cover story. Out of these, my personal favorites are the Living Room, GZ Cafe and Cafe Dan for coffee and ambiance.
There’s Jesse’s for Shanghainese, which is a must try for anybody coming here. This is a good time to try their hairy crab tofu, which is delicious. If you want to splurge, then definitely get the wine marinated crab (it’s around RMB250). It’s freaken delicious, has lots of roe (it’s bigger than hairy crab) and can be split among 2-3 people. Also try the glutinous rice stuffed dates, the grandmother’s hong shao rou and if you are going with at least two other people, the fish head cooked in a canopy green onions (order this in advance, and always make a reservation).
The best sushi buffet in town is this place in Hongqiao. It’s around RMB220 for all-you can-eat sushi and all you can drink too (they have hot and cold sake, iced plum wine, milkshakes, etc.) For quality in a buffet setting, this place is the best. They have fresh oysters on the half-shell and sea urchin, steak, etc. They don’t skim on the good stuff.
Crunchy cartilage-laden chicken
I stumbled upon a Cantonese restaurant this summer when I was waiting for my friend to finish up work in Beijing. I had just had the worst “soup dumplings” of my life a few shops over where they were more steamed buns with juice inside that had long since leaked out. In desperation for a good meal, I saw a few people eating something delicious through the large glass windows of this restaurant and decided to give it a whirl.
There is something intensely comforting and yes, American, about Cantonese food since that’s the root of the USA’s rendition of the cuisine. I ordered a pork congee – soothing, fragrant, and creamy. Then a platter of this chicken dish which had a tensile crunch in each bite from the soft cartilage inside. I definitely skew more Chinese in this respect, since I love have some extra texture in the meat. The peppers were a gorgeous bright red, crispy, and fried until all the heat had abandoned their mean-looking flesh. Even the rice came nicely presented in a white ceramic pot. It seemed like a good photo, so I took one.
Fried, cartilage-laden chicken with fried peppers, pork congee on the side. Ancient cellphone mine.
BOMB Lemonade at Baraka Cafe in Central Square
So I was supposed to have dinner at the Helmand in Kendall Square (and try their semi-famous pumpkin kaddo dish), but due to a hilarious error, that night went down like this:
Fabulous Friend: I’m so so so sorry. I thought I made reservations at the Helmand, but I actually made them at The Helmand in Baltimore. [Understandable, since he’s from Britain and doesn’t understand the subtleties of area code.]
Me: Oh.
Fabulous Friend: I’m so sorry!
Me: I guess we’ll get all 14 people to fit in some place in Harvard Square?
So in the stroke of time, I called my never-fail friend, “lifestyle” blogger Lena Chen who immediately made an RSVP for our outsize group at Algerian-Tunisian and North African Baraka Cafe in Central Square. Magically, it all worked out.
A tiny, charming interior - a nice option for a romantic meal.
My friend and I arrived as the rest of the group chatted outside of the door – it was located in some very random residential area about a 15 min. walk from the T station. We stood right in view of the waiters, who literally took 5 minutes to finally take note of the diners who had arrived. I guess we weren’t stampy or demanding enough. It was going to be a bit of a wait, so a small group of us wandered into Hubba Hubba, an unapologetically campy sex shop on Mass Ave where we ogled some lingerie before the owner’s friend out of the blue claimed that the Middle East sprinkled lard in their vegan food and unloaded about her chemo treatments. Back to the restaurant it was.
After we sat down, I did some camera tricks to show how to get really crisp pictures in low light situations, like this one of a salt-holder. (Not shaker. You picked up the coarse grains with your fingertips.)
Digital camera magic! Good for impressing party guests - even beats shotgunning Natty Ice.
I really have to say that I will post some pictures of the food, which was decent despite the comically, lovingly surly service, but this night was all about the LEMONADE which deserves all caps. If you do anything here, you must get the lemonade. And once you drink this lemonade, you will want to take a bath everyday in it so it can seep into your unworthy pores. Or maybe make some kind of celebrity-backed scent out of it.
If I were so religiously inclined, I might even bless my firstborn with it.
It comes with rose petals floating on it surface. Inhale the aroma, and it’s nothing like the drink mix lemonade of childhood yore – it’s sweeter, more floral, and heavier from the North African spices. Its flavor has strong notes of rosewater (which never veers into the perfumey fake territory) and spice, which underscored the flavor with a uniquely adult heft. It preferred a full-bodied sweetness to tartness, and strangely, my glass never felt cloying. This was lemonade for lovers.
I had Melkha, an eggplant dish with couscous, feta, and gruyere. The eggplant was cooked to a lusciously silky texture, but I wish they had put more feta and olives in – combined with plain couscous, it was rather bland for my tastes. By the time I realized I should salt the life out of it, I had already finished most of it.
Here are other people’s more exciting dishes:
And a fab vegetarian platter:
Baraka is worth a stop, just for the lemonade alone. It’s a nice spot to take to impress a date with your random foodie knowledge since it’s intimate, romantic, and secluded with exposed brick walls and tables that gently quake as the (somewhat surly) waiters walk past. Ok, so it took us an entire hour to get our food, but their hummus was fabulous and the lemonade! The lemonade!!
Find it!
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80 Pearl St
Sublime fried eggplant salad at Cafe Algiers
Algiers is the kind of place that I often throw out as a good first date location: it has charm, a bit of old world romance, and that je ne sais quoi flavor of bohemian Cambridge before the Gap moved in. However, I always throw in a word of caution that the prices are uh, pretty inflated. You pay for ambience in the form of 5 dollar coffees and $3.50 plain bagels (!). (They might even charge extra for cream cheese.) Their food menu are dependable Middle Eastern dishes at higher than the average cafe price points – expect to drop at least $13-14 for a decent entree. For drinks, I recommend their mocha arabica – muddy, chocolatey, and comes in its own pot.
Fried eggplant salad
I have a secret love affair with eggplants, so I went for a fried eggplant salad, which seemed like it would be delicious (it was) and the word “salad” in it made me feel better about eating fried food when I should really be on a strict beauty queen diet. It came with a basket of Syrian bread, making for absolutely luscious, sensual, interactive eating: cutting up the salty, flavor-soaked eggplant, wrapping it up with feta cheese and dressed greens, and eating it one mini-wrap at a time. The waitress came right after I had mopped my platter spit-shine clean with some bread.
“You came just in time,” I told her. I might have actually licked the plate.
Find it!
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Algiers
40 Brattle St
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 492-1557
9 Questions with Boston Food Critic MC Slim JB
Is that MC Slim JB with Pam Anderson or some random dude in a mask? We will never know.
Totally baller Boston food writer MC Slim JB is such a mysterious figure, he can’t even let me hear his voice. I can only imagine what defining vocal characteristic this would give away – maybe a telltale Irish brogue or rarefied and damning Eton-bred lilt. Anyway, I figured he would be an interesting interview for STUFF magazine where I intern. And he was!
Seriously guys, food writing is no joke. I’m not going to pretend I would prefer to make financial powerpoints until my fingers bleed or give spongebaths to convicted pedophiles or anything, but this is not all eating fancy meals, scribbling down a few pompous notes, and calling it a day. You spend a lot of your time working with people’s schedules and RSVPs, eating even when you’re stuffed, suffering through terrible meals as well as the great ones, and dealing with obnoxious dining partners who feel the need to loudly announce to the waiter that you’re doing a review as you try to become the same color as the drapery.
Also, the calories. We’re talking about some hardcore cardio to blast off that lukewarm samosa served up with major waiter attitude. Who cares that it was comped when it shows up on your waistline? Getting fat knows no professional boundaries!
MC Slim JB, I applaud you.
An excerpt:
Many high–profile restaurant critics are spotted no matter how hard they try to disguise themselves or make up pseudonyms. They argue that the restaurant can’t really change its quality on the fly. If this is true, why bother with the anonymity?
I think serious professionals should at least try to maintain their anonymity. There’s still plenty a restaurant can do to make a VIP’s meal better than the typical diner walking in off the street: the choicest cuts of meat, the most select produce, the most meticulous plating, the shortest time from the pass to the table, the most carefully made drinks, the most exacting wine service, the most attentive table service. “The biggest berries,” is how [former New York Times critic Ruth] Reichl puts it — she had a plate literally snatched from under her nose when the restaurant realized mid-meal who she was; it was returned a moment later with nicer fruit on it. A lot of little things like this can add up to a significantly more impressive overall dining experience: not a fair impression of what the typical diner gets.
Lana Lingbo Li
I'm a world traveler / enthusiastic eater who's now blogging and producing videos over at HelloLana.com. Visit me there!
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