Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times
In today's Shanghai, you'll find China's future and its past, but not its present.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Monday, November 20, 2006
SHANGHAI, CHINA: Frommer's Favorite Experiences
November 20, 2006
The most widely known street in Asia, with its gorgeous colonial buildings that were the banks, hotels, trading firms, and private clubs of foreign taipans (bosses of old Shanghai's trading firms) and adventurers past, deserves to be walked over and over again. See up close the exquisite architectural details of the Peace Hotel, the Customs House, the former Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and scores of other buildings, some lavishly restored, others closed and awaiting development. Then head across the street to the Bund Promenade, where you mingle with the masses while admiring the splendor and grandeur of old Shanghai. After you've seen it by day, come back again at night for a different perspective.
China's finest, most modern, and most memorable museum of historic relics has disappointed almost no visitor since it opened in the heart of People's Square. Make it a top priority, and allow a few hours more than you planned on.
After crossing the Huangpu River from old Shanghai to the new Shanghai), enjoy the ultimate panorama from either the sphere atop the Oriental Pearl TV Tower; the 88th-floor observatory of the Jin Mao Tower; or the 100th-floor all-glass observation deck of the new Shanghai World Financial Center. All three rank as some of Asia's tallest structures. On a clear day, you can see forever.
A 27km (17-mile) pleasure cruise from the Bund to the mouth of the mighty Yangzi River, past endless wharves, factories, and tankers at anchor, gives substance to Shanghai's claim as China's largest port and the fact that nearly half of China's trade with the outside world travels these same waters. A shorter 1-hour cruise, and an abbreviated 30-minute cruise from the Pudong side, do not convey the full importance of the river, but they will suffice if you're pressed for time.
To paraphrase a local saying, if you haven't shopped, you haven't been to Shanghai. Savvy locals know if you want greater choice and better deals, Huaihai Lu, with its slew of international boutiques and large department stores, is the place to shop. Branching off and parallel to Huaihai Lu, Maoming Lu, Xingle Lu, and Changle Lu are also home to a number of delightful small shops. Even if you're the kind of person who only shops once a year, a visit to Nanjing Lu, the "Number One Shopping Street in China" is practically required, if only for a chance to marvel (or shudder) at the sheer numbers of people, people, people everywhere! A pedestrian mall makes strolling and browsing that much easier and that much more crowded. Finally, Taikang Lu, with its ever-growing block of small shops, artists' studios, and outdoor cafes, makes for a delightful afternoon of shopping.
Shanghai has any number of antiques markets where you can hone your bargaining skills. Two of the top choices are the more touristy Dongtai Lu Antique Market and the slightly more ragtag but colorful Fuyou Market in the old Chinese city (at the western end of Shanghai's restored old street, Shanghai Lao Jie). Half the fun is in rifling through all the personal collections of memorabilia and antiques that the vendors seem to have scavenged; the other half is in dramatically protesting the high prices quoted, walking away, then being called back by a vendor newly willing to deal. The same process and joys of bargaining apply when trying to purchase knock-off designer goods, but caveat emptor.
In the mid-19th century, Sephardic Jews from the Middle East helped make Shanghai a great city. In the mid-20th century, thousands of Jewish refugees flooded the International Settlement north of the Bund. Today, this history can be encountered at the former Ohel Moshe Synagogue, today renamed the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum, with an exhibit documenting life in this little-known but important Jewish ghetto.
The night views of the Bund and Pudong are simply not to be missed. Viewing options include dining at one of the Bund restaurants, such as M on the Bund or Laris, and then crossing the river to Jade on 36 in Pudong for a nightcap (you can also reverse the order). Better yet, savor the best of both worlds by finishing off the evening at Vue bar at Hyatt on the Bund where you can behold the nightlights on both shores of the Huangpu River, while soaking in an outdoor Jacuzzi!
This has "TOURIST" stamped all over it, but it's nevertheless a totally worthwhile pleasure, especially since Shanghai's dazzling troupes are rightly considered China's very finest at this ancient craft.
The famous Peace Hotel Jazz Band's nightly performances of New Orleans-style jazz, with some members who have been playing here since before the Revolution in 1949, have lost much of their nostalgic draw since temporarily relocating to the Huating Hotel while the Peace undergoes renovation, but take heart, jazz lovers. Modern and more improvisational jazz can be heard at a number of true-blue joints: the Cotton Club, Club JZ, and the House of Blues and Jazz.
There are any number of picturesque "water villages" near Shanghai where you can be paddled in a gondola along streams and canals as you pass traditional arched bridges, quaint stone houses, and classical Chinese gardens. Two villages stand out: Tongli and Nanxun. Also, both have additional sights worth seeing and considerably smaller crowds than at tourist traps like Zhou Zhuang, but see them soon.
Excerpted from Frommer's Shanghai, 5th Edition © 2009
Sunday, October 15, 2006
SHANGHAI, CHINA: Booming Shanghai
Some may call Shanghai Asia’s Las Vegas, but whatever its moniker, the city is China’s financial capital, its fashion center and its most attractive metropolis, particularly after nightfall. Qilai Shen for The New York Times
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
SHANGHAI, CHINA: Revitalizing Shanghai, with a maverick's touch
Published: Tuesday, August 15, 2006
By Julie V. Iovine, Travel & Dining - International Herald Tribune
Ben Wood has neither the theory-ridden vocabulary nor the matte-black wardrobe typical of maverick architects these days. With his gentle paunch, worn leather sandals and grizzly white beard, he comes across as more of a couch potato than a man of action, though the vintage Chinese army motorcycle and sidecar hint at an adventurous spirit.
Still, over the past five years Wood has transformed himself from a successful Boston architect into a Shanghai power broker whose designs translate into billions of dollars in development.
The profession's big players are flocking to China to compete for commissions. Even the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has raved about the opportunities to be had. But Wood is one of the very few allowed to build whole neighborhoods without a local associate or a government institute to sign the construction documents. At his occasional public appearances in the United States, architects line up to seek his advice on how to get in on the action.
"I'm trying to change China, and China has definitely changed me," Wood said during a recent interview on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, where he and his wife were camping in a safari- style tent. "People have no idea of the scope of the work that's up for grabs right now. It's like the Wild West was in America."
The turning point for Wood, now 58, was his 2003 Xintiandi project in central Shanghai, a $200 million two-block "entertainment environment" stuffed with modern restaurants, clubs, cafés and boutiques, accessorized with old bricks, stone gates and ornately carved wooden balconies from the dense warren of old courtyard houses that previously filled those blocks. Xintiandi proved so successful a model for urban redevelopment that it spawned at least dozens of duplicates across the country. Developers now use the term "to Xintiandi" when asking their architects for more aspirational China-lite designs.
Critics, however, argue that Wood has undermined the need to preserve China's fast-vanishing architectural heritage with a pastiche that is only one photo-op away from Disneyland. In The New Yorker magazine Paul Goldberger described Xintiandi as "a stage set of an idyllic past, created so that people in China can experience the same finely wrought balance of theme park and shopping mall that increasingly passes for upscale urban life in the United States." Qingyun Ma, an internationally respected architect in China, said that Xintiandi's influence "is such that every city wants to have one."
Wood has applied his formula to projects all over mainland China, from Chongqing to Wuhan to Hangzhou. In Hangzhou he adapted 10 blocks of a sleepy lakeside area into a resort with pagoda-style roof-scapes, trellis- covered walkways and a high-tech conference center. For his $80 million Cambridge Watertown project in Zhujiajiao, he has proposed narrow canals inspired by China's 13th-century water-town plans stitched together with picturesque foot bridges and semi- detached contemporary-style condos.
"Wood is a star in China," said Cliff Pierson, an editor at Architectural Record magazine who manages a biannual awards program for Chinese architecture. "China needed someone like Wood to show them you can make more money by saving rather than tearing down old buildings. No one had done that before because it was so much easier to work with a blank slate."
Wood casts himself as a kind of swashbuckling suit. After stints as a fighter pilot, restaurateur, ski bum and contractor, he earned his architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, when he was 37. He then spent 10 years working for Ben Thompson, the architect and mastermind of something known in the industry as the festival marketplace. Most visible in places like Faneuil Hall in Boston and South Street Seaport in New York, it is an economic juggernaut of arguable distinction wherein the dilapidated gives way to the upscale and the trendy, all with a dash of old-time historical flavor.
The call to go to China came in 1998, when Wood was running an architecture practice with Carlos Zapata in Boston. The two were invited along with several Western architectural firms to enter a Hong Kong developer's competition for a two-block neighborhood in old Shanghai. There was a catch: The site had to be cleared of undesirable elements. While other architects suggested tearing out the old rabbit warren of courtyard houses, built by the French in the 1860s on interlaced narrow lanes, Wood said he could design around and with them. He got the job.
Working in Shanghai was a revelation. He did not speak Mandarin, and he hiked around the city so he would be able to find his way back to his hotel without relying on a cab. To get a feel for the local vernacular, he asked guides to take him to places that hadn't changed much for a hundred years or since before there was electricity. He was especially struck, he said, by the street life along the narrow alleys in the older parts of the French Concession.
At Xintiandi, Wood fostered communal feeling in some notably un-Chinese ways. Despite having been warned that there is no Chinese tradition for alfresco dining, he designed the neighborhood to be chockablock with outdoor cafés. He also created a wide esplanade sweeping along the edge of an artificial lake.
Photographs show a waterfront view with a swath of well-kept lawn, a string of lampposts along a stone path and various high-rises twinkling at night in the background: hardly a traditional vista for Shanghai.
To make way for all this, many of the 4,500 people who used to live there had to be relocated to modern apartment buildings; those who did not want to go, Wood acknowledged, were likely to find their roofs removed. Such forced relocations are frequently criticized by foreigners. Locals, perhaps used to even more radical changes, seem to take them more in stride. Wood himself simply says that everyone was fairly compensated.
Local land values are now soaring. But Wood said he was most proud of the way that Xintiandi has attracted small entrepreneurs who are buying and renting shop fronts for their own boutique businesses.
"I was working in unknown territory, and sometimes it was scary," he said of that first project. "At the same time here was someplace where I could do more in 15 years than most architects do in their entire careers." So in 2004 he decided to move to China full time.
Two years later he still comes across as a hyped- up romantic who relishes the prospect of living big and does not overly concern himself with compromises that a more fastidious architect might refuse. Wood also said that building in China had an appealing immediacy. "In the United States you are not allowed as an architect to speak to a worker on a construction site, make a suggestion or help figure out a design flaw when it crops up," he said, lamenting the protocols regarding liabilities and the union regulations that govern most American construction sites. On an American project, "you can't say anything at all without a lawyer in tow," he added. "In China they often don't even bother with contracts."
Wood has opened a martini bar, called DR (for Design Research, in tribute to a store founded by Ben Thompson), in Xintiandi that has become a pit stop for architects and developers visiting from abroad. "It has a definite vibe, part SoHo, part Rick's Place," said Pierson of the Architectural Record. "A lot of expats go there, and Wood loves holding court. He wears that beard, and in China they tend to automatically respect people with white beards."
Pierson acknowledged that Wood's approach to architecture would not go over well with Western preservationists. "He keeps facades, moves pieces around, adds windows where there were none," he said. "If he were doing that with historic properties in the U.S., I would be more critical. But for China saving even bits and pieces is an important leap. Ten years from now when preservation there has become more sophisticated, they'll be able to look back and say this was the first important step."
For the next stage in his career Wood wants to design eco-resorts in Yunnan Province, a rolling mountainous and pasture region near the Tibetan border. He envisions visitors staying in tents much like his own on Martha's Vineyard.
He has also bought an old Tibetan farmhouse that he hopes to renovate and where he might be able to keep and fly a 1947 Seabee plane he has had restored. "I'm going to stay in China a while longer," he said. "There are limits to what I can do in the United States. I don't fit in with the CEO culture there. But in China being flamboyant is a good thing."
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
SHANGHAI, CHINA: Shanghai, a Far East Feast
Nan Xiang is famous for its soup dumplings. Nelson Ching for The New York Times
October 9, 2005
Shanghai, a Far East Feast
MADE for trade, the modern city of Shanghai came into being in the second half of the 19th century as a commercial link with the West. British, French, German and American traders settled there, eventually followed by White Russian refugees. They built a metropolis with Asia's first telephones, running water and electric power, a city of drugs, warlords, brothels and legendary riches. And like all expatriates everywhere, they brought their tastes in food with them. To this day, the Shanghainese have an appetite for croissants and French pastry and for Russian borscht (luo song tang, or Russian soup, on menus) although many may well not know their precise origins.
After 1949, the old hedonistic culture was gradually submerged in Communist conformity, with gray tunics and shabby state shops supplanting the chic boutiques and throbbing dance halls that gave Shanghai its reputation as "the whore of the Orient." By all accounts, food, and especially restaurant food, took a back seat to ideology.
"Ten years ago, a good restaurant was one that paid you," said Don St. Pierre Jr., managing partner of ASC, China's leading wine importer, with only modest hyperbole. "Now we're on the verge of being a world-class restaurant town." Richard Bisset, another old China hand, said that 17 years ago, when he came to Shanghai, "the Western food here ranged from Kobe beef to prawn thermidor. Full stop."
Today, Shanghai is again one of the most galvanic cities anywhere, with foreigners once more pouring in to seek their fortunes and the port seemingly on its way to becoming the world's busiest. It makes an old-timer like me long to be young again and live there to share in its drama. For 13 straight years, it has maintained a double-digit growth rate, as the largely vacant landscape on the eastern side of the Huangpu River has been magically transformed into the steel-and-glass financial center called Pudong. With more than 2,000 flamboyant skyscrapers, Shanghai is now a vertical village rather than the low-lying city of the 1930's, much of it built by Jewish merchants of Iraqi or Syrian origin like the Sassoons and Kadoories. The only echo of the Sassoons today is a Vidal Sassoon (no kin) hairdressing salon. But the Kadoories, who control the Hong-Kong-based Peninsula chain, are building a luxurious hotel on the Bund, the boulevard along the river.
The slightly pompous colonial buildings lining the Bund already house some of the toniest of the city's new generation of international restaurants, including the Michael Graves-designed Jean-Georges. Renowned chefs and obscure entrepreneurs from Britain, Singapore, Australia, the United States and elsewhere have flocked to Shanghai on the heels of the bankers and brokers, eager to serve you Italian, Japanese, Thai, German or Mexican food.
Foods from afar compete with heaping helpings of first-rate Chinese dishes, from Guangzhou, Sichuan, Hunan and of course Shanghai. Local river prawns, slow-cooked pork rump, hairy crabs (in season) and above all xiao long bao, the soup dumplings beloved in the United States, are all on offer in classic form.
The culinary renaissance is one reason, in fact, for Shanghai's re-emergence as a prime tourist destination, along with the city's refreshing green "lungs" - the many new parks and the thousands of plane trees in the former French Concession - its matchless new art museum, its Art Deco villas and office buildings, and the endless joie de vivre of its people. Gloomy, unsmiling and reluctant to make eye contact when my wife, Betsey, and I last visited the city a decade ago, they laugh and joke today, free at last to indulge in those old Shanghai pastimes, making money and spending it with abandon.
On the second morning of our most recent stay in Shanghai, we ran into Jean-Georges Vongerichten and his right-hand man, Daniel Del Vecchio, at the Westin Hotel's startlingly polycultural breakfast buffet. That happy accident led to a sampling of Shanghainese food at its most down-to-earth at breakfast-time the next day.
Near the corner of Changle Lu and Xiang Yang Bei Lu, not far from the museum, where banners were incongruously heralding an exhibition about Versailles and Louis XIV, we each polished off a half-dozen steamed, pork-filled soup dumplings, the size of a silver dollar, with perilously fragile skins, without spilling too much of the scalding liquid on our shirts. Unlike most of the other stalls, the place where we ate these actually had a few tables and stools, and even a sign outside. Its name: Maxim's.
Thicker-skinned dumplings, sheng jian bao, fried cheek-to-cheek in shallow iron pans and then steamed, were dusted with chives and black sesame seeds. We followed instructions to dip them in the exceptional black Zhenjiang vinegar. Eye-poppingly good they were, too, although Jereme (pronounced Jeremy) Leung, a member of our noshing group, speculated slyly that the frying oil had not been changed in years.
There were crepes at other stalls - delicate cong you bing, or scallion pancakes, and ji dan bing, a kind of breakfast burrito. To make that, a short-order wizard spread batter on a drum-shaped grill with what looked like a painter's spatula, broke an egg on top, added a dab of fermented soybean sauce and threw in some chives, coriander and mustard-plant leaves. The whole process took just a minute. Then he slapped either a salty cruller called you tiao or a piece of crisply fried bean curd skin across the finished product and rolled it up like a scroll. Mr. Vongerichten, in seventh heaven, pronounced it "the best breakfast in the world."
By that time, I felt fat as a Strasbourg goose, but my eating buddies insisted that we stop at a 24-hour noodle shop on Shandong Zhonglu, behind the Westin, to watch a particularly deft cook do his stuff. "No need to eat," said Mr. Leung, a Hong Kong-born Chinese. "Just watch." Sure. We watched, all right, as a huge ball of dough was kneaded and rolled and tossed and hacked into ragged little squares that reminded Mr. Vongerichten, an Alsatian, of spaetzle, and twisted and stretched and flipped and folded into long, supple noodles. But of course I had to sample a bowl of beef noodle soup, lightly curry-flavored, before we left, and of course that spoiled my lunch.
Bao Luo, in the French Concession, is all you might expect a Chinese restaurant to be - big, raucous, smoke-filled, dingy despite the marble on the walls - and more. It's open until 6 in the morning, and it often features a parade of fashionistas in thigh-high white boots around midnight. Its menu provides a primer of home-style Shanghainese cooking, however bizarre the English translations (for example, "lima bean curd with crisp hell"). Cold dishes first - amazingly tender, custardlike tofu, a reproach to the flannel-like stuff often served outside China, topped with coriander and chili oil; ma lan tou, made from the crunchy stems of the boltonia flower (a member of the aster family that I grow, but don't eat, at my farm in Pennsylvania); "drunken" chicken, marinated in rice wine; and kaofu, bran cubes flavored by five-spice soy sauce. This is no cuisine for the squeamish.
Warm plates filled the table as six of us struggled to keep up. Ti pang, the fabulously fatty Shanghainese pork shank, was luscious as foie gras. (One of our six, Tina Kanagaratnam, a Singapore-born food writer, told me, "Shanghai girls say that if you don't eat the fat you won't have good skin.") Crystal river prawns, bathed in egg whites before stir-frying, and yu xiang qiezi bao, spicy caramelized eggplant, were among my favorites. Patrick Cranley, Ms. Kanagaratnam's husband, a fluent Mandarin-speaker from Baltimore, noted that this was originally a Sichuan dish, long ago adopted by Shanghai as its own. "Something in the Shanghainese character," he said, "helps them to absorb, adapt and flourish."
Having emerged intact from Shanghainese culinary primary school, we moved directly to postgraduate studies at an unprepossessing four-table hole in the wall called Chun, a block from the Jin Jiang Hotel, where Chou En-lai and Richard M. Nixon issued their momentous communiqué in 1972. Susan Shirk, the State Department's top China expert in the Clinton administration, recommended it, and Dingli Shen, the Shanghai-born, Princeton-educated executive dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, joined us there. He had never been before, he said, but by the time we finished a lunchtime feast, which cost less than $8 a head, under the naked, unforgiving fluorescent bulbs, he assured us that he had never eaten better in his native city.
That didn't surprise us a bit. Not after Lan-Lan, the round-faced, T-shirt-clad 47-year-old proprietor, who resisted all attempts to discover her formal name, had brought out her wares: among other treats, more heavenly tofu, served with salted duck egg yolk and clam strips; thin-shelled river shrimp, roe still attached, steamed with ginger; whole pomfret braised in soy (with plenty of Shanghai's beloved sugar added) and the pièce de résistance, giant snails whose meat had been removed, then chopped, mixed with pork and spices and reinserted into the shells. I don't know which was better, the fragrant juices we sucked out of the shells or the meat we pried out with toothpicks.
"To be born in Shanghai is a great privilege," Dr. Shen mused. "You get better education, better economic opportunity, better health care, better everything than elsewhere in China." To which I added, "and some of the world's best food."
Soup dumplings are the province of specialists armed with minuscule rolling pins. The most famous of all are made at the three-story Nan Xiang restaurant, adjacent to the ancient Yu Garden, whose teahouse served as the inspiration for millions of pieces of "willow pattern" china. All the world adores Nan Xiang, so reserve a day ahead, or resign yourself to a long wait.
Try in any case to wangle a seat on the third floor, the only place where the most scrumptious dumplings are served - those whose filling includes crab roe as well as the usual crabmeat, pork and scallions. Two things set great dumplings apart from ordinary ones: the quality of the "soup," or broth, which at Nan Xiang has the mellow richness of the best veal stock, and the texture of the dumpling skins, which at Nan Xiang are translucently, meltingly thin. Wobbling winningly in their steamer, these tidbits are rivaled in Shanghai only by those at Din Tai Fung, a branch of a legendary Taipei dumpling house, which also has an outlet in Arcadia, Calif., near Los Angeles.
In the rush to modernize, much of picturesque old Shanghai has been bulldozed, though not the junk shops of Fangbang Lu, where Betsey bought a crystal ball, perhaps in hopes of divining the future of this remarkable city, where communism and capitalism thrive alongside one another against all the odds. In Xintiandi, near there, renovated and reconstructed shikumen (stone-gated) houses have been grouped into a shopping, strolling and dining complex. Wildly popular with Chinese as well as with foreign visitors, it is Shanghai's first big stab at the adaptive reuse of old buildings.
They sometimes call Shanghai Shang-buy, and in Xintiandi you can buy minimalist handbags and sleek silk pajamas with jade buttons at Annabel Lee, velvet blazers and feathered hats at Xavier, and modern design from Scandinavia, Thailand, Italy and even China at Simply Life. You can drink coffee, nibble glorious pastries and buy hand-made chocolates at Visage. You can have a drink at TMSK, sitting on crystal stools at a crystal bar, or at nearby Zin (short for Zinfandel), a nifty wine bar.
Xin Ji Shi is the serious-chow champ of Xintiandi, whose name means "new heaven and earth." It may well serve the best hong shao rou, or red-cooked pork, in town, made from cubed pork belly bathed in a sauce made from star anise, sugar and Shanghai soy sauce, which is considered China's finest. The décor may be upscale, nouvelle Shanghai, all burnished wood and smoky glass panels, but the cooking is traditional. Our meal at Xin Ji Shi was also memorable for a basket brimming with big, rosy prawns, roast chicken and dried chilies and for a bottle of 1993 Corton brought by Mr. St. Pierre, much less so for an eel dish totally overwhelmed by a sweet, sludgy sauce.
Hong Kong, in the form of the handsome glass-and-granite Crystal Jade dim sum emporium, is just a few steps away from Xin Ji Shi. All the southern Chinese favorites - including char siu bao (barbecued pork buns), shrimp-filled har gow and egg tarts, among many others - are prepared to order and served at once, not rolled through the dining room on carts. But this is Shanghai, so there are also more northern delights like crispy won tons with hot chili sauce and, of course, soup dumplings. All are light and delicate, altogether first rate.
You can eat modern Sichuan food at South Beauty's four locations and carefully made vegetarian dishes at Vegetarian Lifestyle's three. But if pressed for time, I would make a beeline for Guyi, which wins as many points for its chic décor, featuring photos of the Shanghai that was, and its smiling (indeed giggling) service from young women as for its delicious Hunanese food. Not every dish is a flamethrower, which is as things should be. Among the high spots of a meal that balanced texture, color and intensity of flavor with unusual finesse: a great heap of green beans flavored by smoky Hunan ham; a short-rib hot pot with ginger, garlic and chilies; and fried prawns on a skewer.
Unless you like to drink at altitude or crave a steak (in which case head for the upper floors of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, housed in the 54th to 87th floors of the Jinmao Tower building), there's no real need to visit Pudong. Stay on the western side of the river and do your gawking and talking there.
For location, location, etc., you can't match Michelle Garnaut's groundbreaking M on the Bund, opened in 1999. With a heart-stopping view of Pudong's sci-fi skyline right there in front of you, as bold as a billboard, and the Bund's brightly illuminated buildings curving away to your left and right, M's seventh-floor terrace is as fine a perch as Shanghai affords. On balmy nights, moneyed visitors and local movers and shakers still throng it, with their champagne flutes or superbly made dry martinis in hand.
Ms. Garnaut, an Australian long resident in China, serves mostly old-fashioned European food, some of it made from prime local ingredients - opulent Chinese foie gras; crisp-skinned roast suckling pig; and (during their brief season) sensationally sweet peaches from Nanhui, like the ones often depicted on famille-rose porcelain.
"We're proud not to be on the cutting edge," she told me. Fair enough. But the jelly with the foie gras was much too sweet for us, the salt-baked lamb was too salty, and the kitchen seemed to lack the consistency that characterizes some competitors, notably the big, buzzy restaurants at Three on the Bund, a converted bank building.
The dining room of one of them, Laris, is drenched in white - white marble, white tablecloths, white orchids. "The food and clients provide the color here," said the man at its helm, David Laris, formerly chef at Mezzo in London. As befits someone of Greek ancestry, he serves great fish, including raw oysters from three continents, scallops with basil and Kalamata olives, and a fabulously earthy cauliflower and caviar soup, not unlike the brew served by Jean Joho in Chicago.
For those who require turf with their surf, there's also a delicious cross-cultural pairing of five-spiced venison with Vietnamese banana leaf salad. And for the sweet of tooth, Mr. Laris makes a remarkable panna cotta flavored with pandanus leaves, which lend a subtle, vanilla-like taste.
Jean-Georges gave us a nearly flawless meal. After a single Kumamoto oyster with a coronet of Champagne jelly and raw tuna with a dab of mayonnaise made with Thai chili paste, the chef de cuisine, Eric Johnson, sent out an exquisite dish of cubed raw kingfish with Taiwanese mangoes (imported under a new trade agreement) and a chili-lemon granita. Peppery, sweet and acidic, yellow, orange and red, in one bite.
Dish after dish of similar excellence followed, as lunch stretched toward the cocktail hour while boats of every kind chugged along the river outside the restaurant's windows - more foie gras, with star anise flowers; peaches and endive hearts with pistachios and goat cheese dressing; crab dumplings with black pepper oil and tiny local peas; sweet scallops from Dalian, a port in north China, seared and paired with clams in a tomato jus; stunningly fresh steamed snapper on a basil purée, topped with cucumber strips for crunch; and Jason Casey's irresistible desserts, which coaxed every nuance of flavor from lush tropical fruits.
The service in the elegant copper-and-blue dining room was silent and skillful, which is more than one can say about the Whampoa Club, in the same building, where the gifted 34-year-old Mr. Leung presides. His Normandie-like setting, with shantung silk, ostrich skin and hammered metal panels, is elegant enough. But the reception was disorganized, the waitresses' heels clattered intrusively on bare floors, and language skills were so rudimentary that we were utterly bewildered until a supervisor came to our assistance. This is perfectly acceptable at $10 a head, but not at $100.
Mr. Leung's modern take on Chinese regional food is delightful. His caramelized minisquid reminded me why I was once addicted to Cracker Jacks. His "lion's head" pork meatballs came in a sumptuous winter-melon broth, with enoki mushrooms impishly used as "eyes." His king prawns dazzled in a mild wasabi sauce. His crisp, spicy eel strips and smoked fish showed the potential of river fish, treasured in Shanghai.
"We begin with traditional peasant-style recipes and try to update and refine them," he said. "Take the smoked fish. Usually, it's fried in the morning and left to cool all day. It often tastes stale, even rancid. We fry it to order and serve it warm, not at room temperature. But the prawns - those, I must confess, are pure Jereme."
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Table Hopping
The telephone country code for China is 86, and the city code for Shanghai is 21.
Bao Lu, 2721 Fumin Lu; telephone 6279-2827. As many as 300 people are sometimes jammed into this atmospheric spot early in the evening, but go later and the crush isn't as bad. Classic Shanghainese food, less than $15 a head with beer.
Chun, 124 Jinxian Lu; 6256-0301. Have your hotel concierge reserve well ahead for this tiny place, and take a Mandarin-speaking friend or guide if you want to understand what you're being offered. Cheap (under $10) and authentic.
Xin Ji Shi, North Block Xintiandi, Building 9, Number 2, Lane 181; 6336-4746. The setting is sleek, the service is charming, and for the most part the food is very good. Try the noodles flavored with scallions. With wine, about $25.
Nan Xiang, 85 Yuyuan Lu; 6355-4206. Soup-dumpling heaven in the oldest part of the city. All the xiao long bao you can eat for $20.
Din Tai Fung, 12-20 Shuicheng Lu; 6208-4188. It's just a branch of a Taiwanese dumpling house, but who cares? The dumplings and other dishes are first-rate, and the open kitchen puts on quite a show. About $15, $25 with wine.
Crystal Jade, South Block Xintiandi, House 6-7, Lane 123; 6385-8752. Stylish digs and carefully prepared dim sum (including some Shanghai and Beijing items as well as Hong Kong classics) account for long lines. Typically about $20.
Guyi Hunan, 89 Fumin Lu; 6249-5628. There's a string of red peppers made of satin near the door - a warning that the food is spicy, but also a signal of the stylishness of this place. Good value: $12.
M on the Bund, 5 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu; 6350-9988. Great views, excellent wines and competent (if inconsistent) Continental cooking that sometimes ranges into exotica like Persian salads. Eat on the terrace if it's warm. $50.
Laris, 3 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu; 6321-9922. One of Shanghai's few raw bars, with great oysters and clams to begin, and some of the city's most imaginative house-made chocolates to end. This stuff does not come cheap. About $60.
Jean-Georges, 3 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, 6321-7733. China's best Western-style restaurant, and every bit as successful as the Vongerichten palaces back home in New York. Cheaper, too, at $65. Polished service, gorgeous room.
Whampoa Club, 3 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu; 6321-3737. Jereme Leung takes Chinese food out of tourist class and puts it in first, where it belongs. In season, he works magic with the famous Shanghai hairy crabs. $60.
R. W. APPLE Jr. is associate editor of The New York Times.
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
RUSSIA: Poverty and Neglect in Russia's Far East
February 10, 2004
NPR's Lawrence Sheets reports that Russia's far eastern region is becoming that country's most economically depressed area. During the height of the former Soviet Union regime, the government poured money into the region -- but now, residents complain that Russia's new democratic leadership is ignoring them.
Sunday, March 4, 1984
SHANGHAI, CHINA: WHAT'S DOING IN SHANGHAI
March 4, 1984
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN, The Times bureau chief in Peking.
The noise and bustle of the 12 million inhabitants of Shanghai, China's industrial and commercial center, can jolt visitors, and anyone searching for Oriental serenity will not find it there. The city's origins as a fishing village vanished under concrete long ago, and Shanghai now suffers virtually every contemporary urban ailment, including water and air pollution.
But beyond the grimy facades of once elegant buildings lining the Bund, the promenade along the Huangpu River, throbs China's most fascinating and romantic city. The honking, bell-clanging din intimidates some visitors into viewing the metropolis from behind the glass of an air-conditioned bus. But if you are curious and willing to flow with the crowds, the rewards of this deceptively Western-looking city can make Shanghai the high point of a trip to China.
The Old Town
When the Western colonial powers divided Shanghai into concessions in the latter part of the 19th century, they left intact the walled old town where many artisans and traders lived. Even after the wall was torn down in the early 20th century, Westerners were warned against venturing into this quarter without a bodyguard. Today the worst that can happen is to get lost.
Some package tours omit old Shanghai because tour buses get stuck in the narrow, winding streets. But through your hotel you can arrange a taxi to take you there for a couple of dollars and wait for you for about a dollar an hour more.
From the parking lot of the Shanghai Old Town Restaurant, walk a minute or so down Fuyou Road and turn right into arcades housing 100 small specialty shops.
At glassed-in food stalls, you can watch cooks prepare snacks like fat- steamed dumplings (baozi) stuffed with meat or vegetables, and you may sample them by queueing up with the other customers. As you wander past people in faded denim, schoolchildren in red pioneer scarves and soldiers on furlough, you will emerge at a small square pond at the center of which an ornate five-sided teahouse, called a wuxinting, stands on wooden stilts.
Cross over to the teahouse on a bridge that zigzags to keep out evil spirits. (Any sensible soul knows that such spirits can only travel in a straight line.) The teahouse is a good spot to rest and have a cup of Dragon Well tea, costing about 8 cents. As you enter, buy a chit for tea, coffee or cocoa at the cashier's booth. The first floor is open from 5:30 to 11:30 A.M. and from 1 to 4 P.M. (For reasons best known to the management, the teahouse closes for lunch.) The second floor, which affords a better view, is open from 7:30 to 10:30 A.M. and from noon to 4 P.M.
As you cross to the other side of the lake, you can have your picture taken by a young photographer. Bystanders probably won't mind if you ask them to join you. Four photographs cost $1.40. They will be mailed to you if you pay a little extra for postage.
If you have dismissed your taxi, you can get back to familiar territory by walking east along Fuyou or Renmin Roads for about 20 minutes. Notice that because the interiors of the small, two-story houses lining the way are cramped, domestic chores spill out onto the street. Housewives flush out nightsoil buckets or scrub kitchen utensils. Itinerant barbers give haircuts, and men congregate around carts to play cards or kibbitz. It's one of the best shows in town.
Chinese Garden
On the north and east sides of the Old Town pond is the Yuyuan or Happiness Garden, covering five acres and dating from the 16th century. It employs the classical elements of water, trees, rocks and waterside pavilions and has an artificial hill of limestone with a small cave. It also has at least 30 halls, pavilions and towers. Yuyuan was the headquarters of an unsuccessful peasant rebellion in 1853. Today it is favored by honeymooners. It closes for lunch, so arrive before 11:30 A.M.
Boat Ride
If you sail a dozen miles to Wusong where the Huangpu converges with the Yangtze, you will see another side of Shanghai: a major port clogged with sleek steamers, rusty freighters, warships, barges and sailing junks. The round trip takes four hours and costs $6 on the upper deck where foreigners are encouraged to ride. Tickets are sold at the wharf on the Bund just north of the Peace Hotel.
Hotels
Visitors to Shanghai usually have no choice as to where they stay. The China International Travel Service allocates rooms, of which there has been a chronic shortage. But several hotels are worth requesting because they are landmarks.
The Peace Hotel, known as the Cathay before the Communist takeover in 1949, offers the best location, overlooking the Bund and the Huangpu River. The rooms are old, the carpets worn, the bathrooms reminiscent of a neglected rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Worse, the management has sealed off the grand staircase, preventing a fast exit in case of fire. Yet its reputation as China's finest hotel of prewar days lingers. A room for two: about $40 a night.
The Jinjiang Hotel, a complex of buildings in a garden of the old French concession, also retains some of its former elegance in its panelled walls, parquet floors and leaded windows. Rooms for two range from $21 to $30 a night.
The Shanghai Hotel, a 30-story high-rise, was opened last autumn. Its location, near the Shanghai Exhibition Hall, is less central, but rooms are tidy and the young staff tries hard to please. A room for two costs $30.
Restaurants
Shanghai cuisine offers excellent seafood, though the preparation can be oily. The Old Town Restaurant at 242 Fuyou Road specializes in steamed crab, carp and stewed turtle. The Yangzhou Restaurant at 308 East Nanjing also features Shanghai- style cooking but includes dishes from neighboring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. For spicy Sichuan cuisine, try the Sichuan Restaurant at 457 East Nanjing Road or the Luyangcun at 763 East Nanjing Road. Milder Cantonese food is served at the Xinya Restaurant at 719 East Nanjing Road and the Meixin at 314 South Shanxi Road. Chinese patrons can dine well for less than $5 a person, but foreign visitors are usually charged a higher, fixed price of $10 to $15 a person, which covers a set dinner.
Though Shanghai boasts more than 600 restaurants, the best are invariably crowded, so a reservation is essential. Bear in mind that few Chinese restaurants stay open after 7:30 P.M.
If you prefer to order a la carte, go to the eighth-floor dining room of the Peace Hotel. The service can be slow and surly, but from a window table you can pass the time watching ships on the river. Some Western expatriates favor the dining rooms of the Park Hotel, across from the People's Park, where one specialty is shrimp sauteed in egg whites.
Shanghai is the only Chinese city with a tradition of Western cuisine. The Hong Fangzi, or Red House, at 37 South Shanxi Road was called Chez Louis in the old days. Young men take their dates there to show off with a knife and fork. The restaurant is known for its baked clams ($2.50) and vanilla souffle ($3). Quasi-French entrees like sole meuni ere range up to $3.50. The Jinjiang Club, in the old French Club on Maoming Road, offers candlelight dining to live classical string music or old Western pop songs. Most entrees cost about $3, indifferent steaks about $6. For a flaming finale, order omelet Vesuvius ($3), a type of baked Alaska set ablaze with a sorghum liquor called maotai.
Nightlife
Shanghai's nickname - Paris of the East - faded with the change in government 35 years ago. An evening's entertainment now consists of an acrobatic circus with a performing panda or Shaoxing, a stylized form of Chinese opera originating in eastern Zhejiang province. The nearest thing to the old cabarets is the ground-floor bar of the Peace Hotel, where a jazz combo of old Chinese musicians tootles up a nostalgic repertoire of Dixieland and blues.
Souvenir
If you want to take home more than the usual snapshots, visit the photo shop on the second floor of the Shanghai Hotel, where you can dress up in Tang Dynasty costumes and pose against a selection of ancient backdrops. A portait taken by the studio photographer costs $5.
Shopping
Like other Chinese cities, Shanghai has the usual Friendship Store selling mementos and other goods for hard- currency certificates. It is worth visiting the store at 33 East Zhongshan Road to look at wares not available in other cities, including locally made silk cloth and hand-carved wooden figures, such as a boxwood chess set for $58. The store has an annex filled with brush paintings and calligraphy on silk scrolls and another devoted to antiques.
One of the best selections of antiques in all of China, however, can be found in the antiques and curios store at 218-226 Guangdong Road. Prices are high, especially for furniture and porcelain, but everything bears a red wax seal, which is necessary for export. The store is accustomed to shipping purchases to the United States. Among more modestly priced objects are $20 pendants made from shards of Ching Dynasty porcelain.
East Nanjing Road is Shanghai's busiest shopping thoroughfare. Follow it west from the Bund to the No. 1 Department Store at 830 East Nanjing Road, which offers the widest selection of Chinese-made consumer goods, ranging from bicycles to shoelaces. Some good buys are blue cotton sweatsuits and white T-shirts emblazoned with Chinese characters representing ''Shanghai,'' corduroy shoes and slippers, canvas tote bags, workers' jackets and caps, local textiles and toys. The store handles 150,000 customers a day. Most of them are as fascinating as the merchandise. Joining In
If you find yourself in Shanghai on a Sunday, you may want to go to the People's Park to share your knowledge of English with the several hundred residents who for five years have been gathering after 7:30 A.M. just inside the main gate on West Nanjing Road. Some of those practicing English are young factory workers making up for the education they missed during the cultural revolution. Others are older people preserving the English they learned in missionary schools. If you can't find the group, wander around and it will probably find you. In return for your help with the fine points of grammar, someone may invite you home or offer to act as your guide.
Another opportunity to participate occurs along the Bund every day from dawn to 7:30 A.M. Hundreds turn out to practice the slow art of tai jiquan (shadow boxing), and no one will mind if you join in. If you want to watch something livelier, look for the young men practicing wushu, China's original version of the martial art of kung fu.
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