Food and Other Adventures in Shanghai

The Chinese Barbeque I’ve sampled fresh Pani Puri on Chowpatty Beach in Mumbai, crispy samosas in Nepal, Pad Thai on the streets of Bangkok, road side Pho in Hanoi, but no one does street food like the Chinese. And reigning supreme is the Chinese Barbeque. Without trying to sound too much like an advertising writer (which I actually am so that’s that fucked) it offers unbeatable choice and value (am I really writing this?) with outstanding freshness and flavor (shoot me now). You are presented with a line up of skewered kebabs as varied as a game of Guess Who – from fresh oysters, bullfrog, and cow’s penis, to lamb fat, cheesestring mushrooms and (thankfully) some pretty normal stuff. You walk along this parade of skewers with a basket just picking out your menu, hand to Mr Man behind his grill, who after coating it liberal amounts of salt and chili, cooks it to melt in the mouth perfection, while you wait roadside sipping your chilled bottle of Tsing Tao, desperately searching for anything to distract you from the glorious smelling smoke filling your nose.

Cost per head: 15 RMB (herbivore) 25 RMB (carnivore) 

Shanghai has just got better and better.

2 months is a mere drop in the ocean in the context of my life but this city has dominated my existence to such an extent that it’s getting hard to imagine a time without it. In retrospect my first 4 weeks were spent pretty much peering through the looking glass. It’s not until it provides you the chance to slip in beneath the veneer that Shanghai really hooks you in. Suddenly I’m surrounded by a network of friends, a phone full of contacts, bi-weekly squash games, and weekends planned for me by people I barely know. I have become a bona fide contributing Shanghai-ite without even realizing it. And it had very little to do with me.

Daniel Piotrowski is a Polish expat who spends his time building bicycles, taking photos, making time lapse films and generally being a friend to everyone who crosses his path. With a social platform that extends across the Globe, his warm, creative, spontaneous nature is liked by many in Shanghai and adored by his kids in his kindergarten class.

When I arrived, Daniel was away. He had worked at ELFA Juyuen Pre-School since last August but had managed to negotiate extended leave to visit family and friends in Poland and England. Sharon – our dedicated, hard working and outrageously generous boss – hadn’t known whether he would return. So I was in temporary/permanent charge of his class and the only male teacher in the whole school.

I was the Daddy.

But return he did. And though it meant me giving up K1 Peach Blossom (and sharing any Alpha male pretences), his arrival turned out to be quite a stroke of good fortune.

1. Bi Feng Tang 

There’s nothing like tucking into a Brummie balti at 3am after a night on the beers, spooning your Ghee gilded Jalfrezi into your mouth with the help of a radioactive garlic naan while you and your company dissect the previous hours’ frivolity. That is until Bi Feng Tang came into my life. A very popular Hong Kong restaurant chain , it serves up an astonishing array of dishes freshly cooked either 24 hours a day, or at least until its time to go to work the following morning. Its set up for you and your fellow inebriates to plow through a disgusting amount of food, as the last vestiges of night give way to morning. Under the smoke and chatter, the Chinese clubbers, bar hoppers, loved up cuddlers drunkenly poke Bullfrog Hotpot, slurp up Blood casserole, shove down endless Dim Sums enjoying taste sensation after taste sensation. And you know what else?

I could spit from my balcony and hit the restaurant. It’s that close.

Sod it:  let’s Bi Feng Tang it.

Cost per head: 60 to 80 RMB – but that’s because I’m a greedy bastard.

In the last 4 weeks I have been to 3 music festivals. The first one was Midi. 2 weeks later it was World Music. The week after that, Reggae.

But the first one was the Midi festival. Daniel had heard of a music festival going on at Century Park in Pudong – one of the city’s many sizeable, pastoral, landscaped parks. His friends were going, and deciding that his social network was rather more substantial than mine, we plumped for it too.

However when we arrived in the taxi, the queue stretched for miles. I had recently been privy to the Chinese penchant for queuing at the China Pavilion, one of the last remaining Expo 2010 relics still to stand. Then, I was expected to wait for 4½ hours to see something akin to the Birmingham Science and Technology Museum with added lighting. And that would only be if no one pushed in. But this ain’t Britain and if you give the Chinese an inch and they’ll squeeze in 2 elbows, a foot and half an arse cheek.  I had been about to jack it in, until a security guard, taking pity on the lonely paleface among the throbbing hordes, plucked me out and took me right to the front. As I walked past the equivalent population of Sunderland, I’ll always remember it being the first proper indication of the sheer numbers of people in this country.

So when it came to joining the queue for the Midi Festival, with no end in sight, I was worried. I didn’t want to spend my Saturday running out of conversation with a person with his back to me. Luckily, the Chinese seem to do something else as good as queueing. Touts. It almost seemed acceptable – endorsed even. When dealing with people in the billions, it’s not a bad idea to send out a few touts to spread themselves through the crowd, to thin out any monster queue. In return for paying a little extra (only ever around a couple of quid), you get a legitimate ticket and save hours.

Under a balmy Shanghai sun, the festival unfolded very cleanly, tidily and orderly over the course of the day. That was until the beer ran out at 7pm. Oops. The Midi Festival was never going to be a crazy Global Gathering, a mind bending Latitude, a raucous V, but it provided some genuine musical highlights. Like DJ Siesta – a tiny framed native with a slutty librarian look, who apparently ‘single handedly introduced Drum N’ Bass’ to the People’s Republic of China – in tow with her own pet Cockney MC.

However the main highlight was who I met. My social network in the space of 2 days suddenly went from 3 to double figures. I spent the weekend meeting and chatting to like minded individuals, making plans, mulling over offers and invites and simply having a great time. And in the middle of it a big hearted Venezuelan, who cannot blink without making me laugh, walked in centre stage.

Children, say hello to Oscar.

1. Pork Sandwiches / Dumplings / Dim Sum 

I love a good hog bap.

Now that’s not surprising. I love my meat, so the simple concept of getting a load of it and slapping it between bread was always going to stir my loins. The Chinese do their own version of it and it’s class. Sometimes the simplest tweaks can make so much difference. Take one huge pot. A load of pork. Stock, herbs like Bay leaves and leave to stew. For hours. When aforementioned hungry carnivore steps up to the counter, remove the most tender of tender pork cubes, place on a chopping board and add a spoon of chili and pickle. Then grab a healthy fistful of fresh, green coriander and throw it on. And then another healthy fistful of fresh green coriander. What the hell. Throw in a bit more. Chop everything to smithereens with a meat cleaver. Shove the now sizeable coriander hash with a splash of meat into a warm white bap. Pour a ladle full of gravy over the filling, wrap in a plastic bag and hand to the now drooling aforementioned carnivore.

Dive in

Cost per head: 6 RMB (so you know, what the hell… I’ll have 2)

Oscar scared me.

Having been his friend for 2 weeks, I had really come to like him. I could count on Daniel and Oscar as being good mates. Our weekends were being spent hanging out, making new friends while I was introduced to a line-up of loveable rogues as they came out of the woodwork from D&O’s previous life studying Chinese in Kunming, Yunnan Province, South West China.

We were at my second music festival – the World Music Festival in Zhongshan Park – on a cloudy and rainy day in Shanghai. We had just watched Huun Huur Tu from Mongolia with a singer that had sung in the remarkable Tuvan throat style – where 2 separate notes, one bass one treble, are created in the throat at the same time.

“When I first meet people, I ask them ‘how long are you staying in Shanghai for?’…straight away…before anything else. If they tell me less than 2 or 3 months, I just walk away. There’s no point. I’m not going to see them. I don’t want to invest myself in someone who will just end up leaving so soon.”

What? Just like that. Self preservation Venezuelan style. Calculating. However, you realize it’s not unique and it’s rather valid: There’s a real difference between the transient and long termers – a bit like the geek and the jock. Those passing through just play the Shanghai fruit machine with gay abandon and then piss off. Those that stay, form a life, etching out a perfunctory, normal existence…with added whistles and bells. They do so, miles away from home with a smorgasbord of nationalities to peer with. They need to start forming semi permanent alliances in a very non permanent city.

A lot of expats talk about ‘waves’ of friends. Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United, will build a Championship winning team to a peak, relying on the same faces to do their same job, season after season. But it has a shelf life and in the end, it is broken down systemically but swiftly, and replaced with younger, fitter carbon copies in the hope that they can do the same job. You too build a core friendship group. You get close, share great times while taking advantage of the delights of Shanghai only to be decimated by sudden departures – a move for a job, the pull of the family back home – and you’re left with you. You pick yourself up, delve into the forgotten pages of your contact book and start again. You need to be made of stern stuff to really last it out alone. But the constant ‘goodbyes’ you utter must finish you off someday.

It’s seems to be a different world for couples and families. The Pudong District especially offers sprawling compounds full of giant apartment blocks that shadow manicured gardens, swimming pools and tennis courts. Speaking to some of the parents of the children at my school, you hear of mothers that literally do not engage with Shanghai at all. While the husband heads out to work, and after the kids have been dropped off at school, they stay in their compound or if needs must have a driver take them shopping. They seek out other moms like themselves with time on their hands or just… well I don’t know what they do, but very little by all accounts. Shanghai is a transient life bubble for them, a semi-permanent holiday resort. They pointedly refuse to engage with the Chinese on an emotional level, with contact reserved for those times when they are in need of a good or service.

However, most of their younger children – the ones that I teach – seem immune to this up and down, move in, move out momentum; healthy, happy, able to form friendships with both Western and Chinese. They pick up the language astonishing quickly, responding robotically to the requests of the scary (to the kids) Chinese teachers, obedient to their every demand. They just laugh when I tell them to be quiet.

But they are just brilliant to teach.

Any job in which you are repeatedly hugged is always going to be good.  

1. Fujian Snack Restaurant 

Lunch. 12pm. You’ve just spent the last hour supervising the kids eating their gourmet grub, and it’s made you ravenous. You want something quick, easy and cheap. You’ll be wanting the Fujian Snack Restaurant, Pucheng Lu then.

Fujian is a province in the South East of China. I have no idea what it looks like, it’s cultural impact on the world, or what the people are like. But by buggery I love their peanut noodles. Just hot steaming, white rice noodles served on a puddle of spicy peanut sauce. Throw in a cup of Black Chicken soup (literally Chicken with black skin – you got something to say, Ali G?), pork dumplings dipped in spicy chili sauce, wash it down with a cold can of Coke and you have one of the best lunchtime feeds this  side of Philpotts.

Cost per head: 14 RMB (absolute bloody bargain)

There has been one outstanding feature of my stay here. It’s a subject close my heart – in fact, about half a foot away and resting in my stomach.

The Food.

My goodness. My peanut, peanut butter, jelly goodness.

The food here is just un-Fuxing-believable. From across all corners of this vast country, Shanghai plays host to some of the tastiest, fieriest, most ingenious cuisine I. Have. Ever. Tasted.

From tiny, smoky dives to big budget theme restaurants, from street food served in plastic bags, to Michelin starred menus, every little thing you can pick, catch, cook and serve is available here.

It plays such a big part in the daily life of this city. Almost every street has either a sit down restaurant or steam pouring from a hole in the wall where dumplings (Baozi) or noodles are dished out.

In England we reserve eating out for special occasions. Here in China it’s a fundamental part of daily life. I’m sure in the offices around Shanghai, if anyone was to have the audacity to bring a packed lunch…well perish the thought.

After rejoicing in finding an apartment with my own kitchen, my cooking has already tailed off. When I can head out of an evening, share various platters of deliciousness with friends for around the same cost of cooking my own meal, why wouldn’t I?

And like the food, the rest of Shanghai has not stopped making me marvel.

How can I ever take for granted a skyline like this, so utterly ridiculous at times. When I take a taxi to my friend Matthew’s flat for our occasional Chinese-BBQ-followed-by-FIFA-on-the-Playstation nights, the journey takes me onto the elevated road, up in the air driving through the pin cushion of the Shanghai skyscraper landscape. It’s like a Joel Schumacher Gotham City, over the top, garish and utterly mesmerizing.

And Matthew himself has a flat overlooking the Pudong skyline, with the Oriental Tower and the World Financial Centre acting as his wallpaper for the balcony. I know it’s artificial. I know it just endorses the Chinese addiction to concrete, but it is cool to sit back with a beer and a fag and just watch.

I’m sure I would get bored. Eventually. Maybe. Dunno. After all Shanghai can frustrate. The sheer numbers of people, especially on the subway is sometimes overwhelming.

There is endless construction leaving you to refer to your memory banks to remember ‘what the countryside looked like’.

And though I am trying to learn it via podcast, the language is bloody difficult. Especially when there are so many different dialects to confuse you. It’s sometimes hard to find a true Shanghainese, with so much national migration. Even when you do, don’t think your learning their language. The national dialect is Mandarin, or ‘Beijing Chinese’. Shanghainese is just a brutal, machine gun kick of a language that races over your head in a muzzle blast. They are the tough street kids of China, cocky and aggressive, with attitude and spark. And I’m no T-Bird.

Oscar did scare me.  I felt a spotlight on me, an accusation that made me feel guilty, because if he knew I was only staying here for…

…but then how long am I staying here for?

If a city provides you with this extent of fun and functionality, is it wrong to want to stick around and enjoy it?

I’m young, free and single. I don’t have kids to dominate my schedule. My work is easy and fun…

…and I have the biggest playground at my doorstep which I don’t need to call home to enjoy.

Shanghai… its over to you

1. My Marmite from England

You gotta love it.

Unless you hate it

Cost: Priceless 

Danny Gwynne is a Shanghai kindergarten teacher by day and an advertising copywriter for the UK by night. From Birmingham in England, he’s also been writing a blog of his travels across the world. He keeps himself busy to stay out of trouble.

Read his blog in full at dannygwynne.blogspot.com