Shanghai is a city that takes supper seriously, and a substantial part of its restaurant trade happens after ten at night. Some of the older late-night strips have been redeveloped, but the culture has simply moved: the same dishes are now eaten in brightly lit restaurant rows, food courts and converted lanes across the city.
Crayfish
From May to September, crayfish - longxia - dominates. They arrive in basins by the kilogram, cooked with chilli and Sichuan peppercorn, with garlic, or in a mild thirteen-spice broth, and are eaten with the hands, peeled by twisting the tail, and washed down with cold beer. Restaurants specialising in them open in the early evening and run until three or four in the morning. Order a few kilograms between two or three people, add cold dishes and grilled vegetables, and expect a pile of shells at the end.
Skewers and grilled food
The other late-night staple is the grill. Stalls and shopfronts sell lamb, beef, chicken wings, squid, tofu, corn, aubergine and greens on skewers, dusted with cumin and chilli, and charged per stick. You pick from a tray, tell them how spicy, and sit at a plastic table with beer. The best clusters are in the lanes off the main roads and near university areas, where prices are low and the queues are long. Look for the busiest stall; turnover is the best guarantee of freshness.
Congee and noodles
For something gentler there is rice congee - a thin, savoury rice porridge served with pickles, salted egg, fried dough sticks and small plates of preserved vegetables. Congee shops are the classic end to a Shanghai night, cheap, quick and easy on the stomach. Alongside them are the twenty-four hour noodle shops, serving beef noodle soup, wontons and scallion oil noodles. Both are reliable at two in the morning.
Where and when
The old food streets around Huanghe Road near People's Square and the lanes of the old town remain the most concentrated, with additional clusters in the university districts of Yangpu and Putuo and around the bar areas of Jing'an. Most places take mobile payment; a few take cash and very few take foreign cards. Note that the busiest night is Friday, and that many late-night restaurants close entirely for a few days around Lunar New Year.
