101 Easy Dishes with Chinese Liquor

I've been doing a lot of solo eating at restaurants, simply due to the fact that I don't know that many people in Shanghai. This is one kind of adventure. A blind man feeling his way through an enormous cuisine with thousands of years of history and dozens of regional variations.

Quite often I really don't know what I'm going to get when I order something. Sometimes people say it's better not to know, but I'm of the opinion that knowledge is power.

Even when I do know more or less what I'm ordering, and what shows up seems to resemble my order, I still have no real idea what goes together. Am I ordering 5 appetizers? Is this gigantic plate of sliced meat really meant for one person? So many mysteries.

Some of the scales fell from my eyes the other day when some of my colleagues were nice enough to take me out for dinner. The restaurant was on the ninth floor of what purports to be "the biggest mall in Asia". It's about 500 metres away from the "tallest building in China" which itself is directly beside the "second tallest building in China - formerly the tallest building in China". I am informed that this title has been changing hands regularly of late. If this does not impress you enough, then there is also the "third tallest TV or radio tower in the world" within spitting distance.



Regardless of the hyperbole, the view from this place is imposing. The Huangpu river cuts Shanghai right in half, and two downtowns - one old, one new - look across the water at each other.

I was pretty glad to let the Chinese guys handle the menu and ordering and finally get a Chinese meal that was halfway organized. They did ask what I wanted to drink though and I got Suntory beer (三得利) along with a quick lesson on how to pronounce the Chinese name (sān de lì). I hope to at least have my alcohol vocabulary under control by the time I go home.


The food was all traditional Shanghainese. The local cuisine has a reputation for being sweet, oily, and using tons of booze. We started out with Drunken Chicken - cold chicken slices swimming in a bowl of bái jiǔ (白酒) - something like Chinese vodka but made from rice and often flavoured with strange herbs. It's strong like bull. But not bad with a bit of chicken in there.

Various other appetizers followed - little shrimps, jellyfish and other things. They were arriving fast and furious and some deft reorganization was required by the waitstaff when an enormous fish was carried over. This one was also bathed in strong liquor though the taste was a bit more subtle than the chicken.

Vigourous debate ensued when I asked the name of this fish. The assembled wisdom had no answer in English, however it was known to live in the Yangtze River and thus could well be a unilingual fish. Further research the next day with the help of the internet proved that it was in fact Tenualosa reevesii - a name of considerably less utility than the Chinese one I would guess.


After some encouragement I gave the skin a try as well. I can report that it tastes ok but getting the scales out from between your teeth really requires dental floss. On the plus, my omega-3 count is improved now I'm sure.

Following the fish was a gigantic piece of baked pork. Some charades were needed to be certain about which piece of the pig we were dealing with but in the end we settled on the shoulder. No matter where it came from, this was a truly delicious dish. The top layer of skin and fat was like a piece of candy and the meat fell away at the touch. I have to find out what this is actually called in Chinese.



No full-on Chinese meal would be complete without hitting all of your typical land animals and several marine species. A beef dish came after this, followed by one Shanghai classic that I had in fact encountered before - crab and tofu in a thick yellow broth. I'm sure it has a more poetic name in Mandarin. This is a fantastic dish, so although by this time I was getting pretty full I made a good effort to have some.



After all these, a few more appetizers arrived as a wind down. Some kind of bok choi fried up with what appeared to be several dozen cloves of garlic - perhaps this was a digestive aid. At the last was the most famous Shanghai dish of all, xiǎo lóng bāo (小笼包). These are little steamed pork dumplings that are rolled with a piece of frozen soup broth - when the dumpling is cooked the soup melts and then bursts into your mouth when you eat it. Usually they come with a piece of carrot on the bottom and some kind of savoury concoction around the top. These are available at pretty much every restaurant you go to and are just about worth the trip here to get them.


Eating your way through China is the work of a lifetime I think, but now I am a bit closer.

Chinese Word of the Post
差不多 chàbuduō - almost, more or less

Context Sometimes the food you get doesn't really look like the picture on the menu. Sometimes it definitely is not what you ordered at all. If you wonder aloud about this the answer you may get is "chàbuduō"......"close enough!".