Welcome to Shanghai. If this is your first stop in China, it’s likely that the distinct lack of a drab, repressively communist aesthetic may come as some surprise. Instead, feast your eyes upon the Jetsons-esque skyline in the center of the city, opposed by neoclassical heritage buildings on the other side of the Bund, and give in to that East-meets-West, old-meets-new observation that each and every international visitor has made before you.
Since flowering into a trading post at the end of the 19th century and a postmillennial manifestation into China’s ultimate economic force, Shanghai has been a place where the ostentatious, the highfalutin, and the unashamedly ambitious settle down. Part of that legacy is thanks to the French Concession area, which from the mid-19th to mid-20th century contributed tree-lined boulevards, decadent villas, Art Deco residences, and a not insignificant dose of civic pride that pervades local and expat residents to this day.
Whereas Beijing is a city of craft beer and camaraderie, Shanghai is one of cocktail bars, internationalism, and Louis Vuitton stores. Compared with the down-to-earth, preconception-shattering friendliness found in other parts of China, you’d have every right to call Shanghai’s denizens guarded at best and snobbish at worst. But so help us, this is Shanghai, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Shanghai is a breakfast city and an early one at that, so we’ll rise with the dawn to visit one of the last remaining breakfast markets, which have been in gradual decline because of municipal efforts to tidy up the city’s ramshackle street food sellers. This part of the city is an intersection studded with specialty food vendors powering white- and blue-collar workers alike with Shanghai’s four heavenly breakfast kings: fried dough sticks (youtiao, 油条), stuffed sticky rice balls (zifantuan, 粢饭团), fried pastries (dabing, 大饼), and the revelation that is freshly made soy milk (doujiang, 豆浆.) If we arrive early enough, we may catch the cooks boiling and straining great steaming vats of the stuff right on the streets.
My favorite combination of Shanghai’s morning monarchy is a bowl of savory douhua (豆花), a softer-than-silk set tofu topped with salty Shanghai-style pickled cabbage, chopped scallions, and rice-grain-size dried shrimp. After that, I’ll pry you away from ordering a tempting plate of Shanghai’s second-favorite dumplings: pan-fried pork and soup-filled shengjian buns (生煎) and guotie potstickers (锅贴). Really, I promise we’ll try them later.
Finally, it’s time for coffee, and seeing as we spent a grand total of $5 on breakfast between us, I think we can treat ourselves to a luxury DiDi ride (China’s equivalent to Uber or Lyft) to the oddly named % Arabica Shanghai Roastery, our next destination.
Despite being a Hong Kong export, this cavernous homage to caffeine and minimalism has two advantages: It is perfectly demonstrative of Shanghai’s love of all things photogenic, and its location on the Rockbund—a frozen-in-time street perpendicular to the Bund and filled with British architecture.
After a walk along the Bund, we’ll make our way north to Hongkou, a district seldom visited by tourists that offers a glimpse of slower-paced local life. Our stops here will include a stroll through the complicated history of the former Jewish ghetto and a visit to 1933 Laoyangfang, an M.C. Escher–worthy Art Deco complex with a grisly past. You’d never guess it used to be a cattle abattoir. The building was completed in 1933 by the Shanghai municipal government, and the complex combined cutting-edge functionality with distinct architectural motifs of the period, which were slowly making their way into Shanghai. It has long since changed use, and today the complex contains a number of shops and restaurants.
Time permitting, we’ll cab over to Lu Xun Park or Fuxing Park. China takes its public spaces very seriously, and it’s no overstatement to say that Shanghai’s horticultural efforts are really something. Residents, particularly the silver-haired ones, hang out in these parks regardless of the season. They drink tea in pavilions, practice tai chi in bamboo-lined clearings, and play chess, cards, or the ancient Chinese board game called go (and maybe they’ll gamble too, if the cops aren’t watching).
As we watch a shirtless 90-year-old do pull-ups on outdoor gym apparatus, we’ll both resolve to exercise more before swiftly moving on to a noodle and dumpling shop for lunch.
Finally, it’s time for you to meet our dumpling par excellence: xiao long bao. It’s a specialty of Jiangnan cuisine local to Shanghai and the nearby city of Wuxi. These dumplings are notable for their physics-defying containment of piping hot soup and minced pork ball encased in a thin, steamed wrapper.
People have their own ideas about who makes the best, but in my opinion, it’s Lin Long Fang, a sister restaurant the infinitely more touristy dumpling shop Jia Jia Tang Bao. In my imagination, the owners established Lin Long Fang to enable their local clientele to avoid the visitors who flock to the original.
I’ll let you burn your mouth on scalding soup of the first dumpling (hey, it’s a rite of passage), and then show you the correct way to eat them: by allowing a brief rest in Zhenjiang vinegar before nibbling a hole in the side and sipping the cooled soup within. If the season is chillier, we’ll also sample Lin Long Fang’s hairy crab soup dumplings, available during the winter, when the crabs are fat with golden roe and milt. I think these dumplings are by far the most generously filled in the city.
I’ll let you burn your mouth on scalding soup of the first dumpling (hey, it’s a rite of passage), and then show you the correct way to eat them: by allowing a brief rest in Zhenjiang vinegar before nibbling a hole in the side and sipping the cooled soup within. If the season is chillier, we’ll also sample Lin Long Fang’s hairy crab soup dumplings, available during the winter, when the crabs are fat with golden roe and milt. I think these dumplings are by far the most generously filled in the city.
The city might not have an Imperial Palace or a Met Museum–scale institution, but there is one offbeat favorite, and it’s more illuminating than the gilded, state-sponsored take on history. The Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center is a 6,000-strong private collection of post-1949 poster art that portrays the Technicolor optimism of communist China. We’ll cock our heads at the curiously homoerotic undertones of strapping youths affirming Sino-Russian friendship and at posters promoting Mao’s Four Pests campaign, a disastrous undertaking that called for the “patriotic extermination” of mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. As it turned out, in addition to eating grain crops, sparrows keep locusts in check. After the near extinction of the sparrows, locusts all but laid waste to China’s collective farms, causing one of the country’s worst famines and ultimately the deaths of up to 43 million people.
Being virtually flat, Shanghai is a truly fantastic city for walkers and cyclists, and there’s nowhere better for meandering than the former French Concession. This is an area of the city that spans modern-day Luwan and Xuhui districts and was designated to French governance from 1849 to 1943. Today it is home to well-heeled residents, numerous cafés, restaurants, and shops. Peeking over the walls of the villas and strolling along its romantic tree-lined expanses is best done during the long-shadow hours before sunset, when golden light streams through the poplar leaves and illuminates the streets below.
Along the way, we’ll inevitably happen on a stand hawking guotie and shengjian dumplings, and you’ll finally decide which type comes out on top.
Come sundown, we’ll find ourselves at my favorite French café, Épicerie 62 Le Bec. The front of shop boasts the estimable patisserie of chef Nicolas Le Bec (of the French restaurant Villa Le Bec), and at the back there is a dramatically lit wine bar and bottle shop. There we’ll pick a bottle of something to drink during dinner, since many local eateries do not focus on wine sales and allow you to take your own for a small corkage fee. Discover how well French wine pairs with the subtleness of authentic Chinese cuisine.
If we’re feeling flush and in the mood for spice, we’ll visit Chengdu export Yu Zhi Lan for dinner to partake in high-end Sichuan cuisine that employs painstaking cooking methods little seen in Sichuan kitchens today. If there’s a group of us, however, we’ll sample the hearty Benbang-style (本帮, or local) food of Old Jesse—an iconic restaurant with that truest emblem of Shanghainese authenticity: sassy, brusque servers. Scallion roasted cod head, sticky rice-stuffed pig trotter, and wine-cured crabs are all well worth taking a verbal dressing down for.
After dinner, we’ll wind down over well-earned drinks at the Union Trading Co.—run by Chinese-Americans Austin Hu and Yao Lu—a neighborhood cocktail bar where friendliness and hospitality reigns.