Shanghai has the oldest Western restaurant tradition in China, going back to the nineteenth-century concessions, and what grew out of it is a cuisine in its own right. Cooks working for Russian, French and British customers, using local ingredients and local taste, produced a set of dishes now called haipai Western food - literally Shanghai-style Western food - and they are still served in a handful of old restaurants, some of them operating under their original names for more than a century.
The repertoire
The signature dish is a beetroot and tomato soup with shredded beef and cabbage, a local descendant of borscht brought by Russian emigres, served with a swirl of sour cream and eaten with a bread roll; it is sweet, deep red and nothing like the eastern European original. Next comes a breaded pork chop with a thick brown sauce, usually served with French fries or with rice; a pork chop in a bun, the basis of the local fast-food sandwich; a potato salad bound in mayonnaise with ham and peas, sometimes diced apple; cream soups thickened with flour; and a baked dish of chicken or fish in a creamy sauce under a lid of pastry. Desserts run to coffee jelly, ice cream and a dense sponge cake.
The restaurants
The old houses are spread across the former concession areas and the shopping streets: grand names from the 1930s that kept going through the following decades, state-run canteens that turned into restaurants, and family-run places that have been doing the same twenty dishes for forty years. The dining rooms are often unchanged - wooden panelling, white cloths, waiters in waistcoats - and the clientele is mostly local and older, which is a good sign. Prices are moderate; this is not fine dining, and it is not trying to be.
Practical notes
Most of these restaurants serve lunch and dinner daily and take bookings only for groups, so expect to wait or to eat early. Portions are large and the menu is built for sharing. Set menus for two or four are the easy way to try the repertoire without ordering blind, and the staff at the older houses are used to helping. Combining a haipai lunch with a walk through the concession streets works well, since most of the surviving restaurants are within a few blocks of the plane-tree avenues and the old apartment buildings.
