We begin the recap of my extended weekend in Shanghai with another “Blog about dinner.”
It seems the custom with most Chinese meals at restaurants here is to order ridiculous amounts of food. This is what almost all of my Chinese friends here do when we go out to eat. Below is just a sampling of dishes from last Friday’s dinner.
As discussed during the first trip, Shanghai, and the entire Yangtze River delta region are known for seafood. The fish is very fresh and flavorful, but you have to accept that there are going to be lots of bones. Variants of fish cooked in wine sauce, as pictured below, are a common item on local menus.
Non-fish seafood is also plentiful. This squid was presented to look a bit like a fish.
The sauce in this dish was of course rather flavorful and complex, as are most of the sauces I have had in China. The range of sauces, spices and flavors is much richer than one experiences in Chinese food in the U.S.
Even something that seems prosaic like tofu in chili sauce becomes a unique experience. This one was served hot, both in terms of temperature and spice:
Indeed, the goal was to try and eat it before it stopped sizzling, as it is considered to lose much of it’s flavor as it cools.
Finally, something a little different: Crab meat in shells, again with a very unique but more subtle sauce:
They look really good; however, I would hold the chili sauce with the tofu. I can’t handle too spicey stuff.
It seems that it happens a lot, where food cooked in its origin country is different than the food cooked in another country, even if the chefs are from the origin country, and the recipe is the same.
Love that spicy fish! We’re making hotpot at home, yummy 🙂 Isn’t it odd to have
a country that’s mostly piss-poor going broke on lavish banquets? We quietly took 3
dishes off the order after our guide chatted to the waiter and ended up not wasting
food that way.