Shanghai Revisited
On a Saturday evening on the autumn equinox,there was a festive air in Sydney's little Shanghai. I had not been there for months, and yet it was all familiar to me, the parade of brightly lit restaurants and cafes packed with engaged diners and busy staff. Lunar New Year and Valentines were over, but Ching Ming, a day of ancestral worship, was coming in two weeks' time. The night air was not cold and the day had been hot.
We expected, and looked forward to, the dumplings with hot soup steamed inside with pork meat balls. This time the pastry was thin and melted nicely into the inner ingredients. The cook must have been happy that day making these - it showed in the results. Prawns lightly sauteed and eaten with a dash of chili oil turned out to be appetising. We did not order noodles but relied on the basics - steamed white rice. The rice blended better with the plain looking salted duck cuts, a speciality of the central Chinese coast.
Alex remarked that the better ingredients available in Australia - and the fact that a generation of older chefs in Shanghai had been lost to past political turmoil and emigration - had contributed to his observation that Shanghai food tasted even better here than in its original birth place. For example, the pickled stir-fried vegetable slices reminded me more of Japanese food than my perceptions of Chinese, but when using Australian produce, moved me to another dimension in the mouth.
Chicken giblets, pig ears and duck tongues were cooked in variety of ways and displayed at the entrance, where waiting customers could stare longingly at such dishes. My eyes were drawn to the roast duck - the Shanghai version looked more dry but still delicious, the culinary creation achieved in a very different way from its northern and southern competing cuisines in Beijing and Guangzhou.
We were surrounded by fair skinned diners with sharp features and contrasting dark eyebrows, eyes and hair. Shanghai has a language of its own, apart from Mandarin, and its locals also look slightly different from southern Chinese. They can be the most commercial-minded people in the variety that is China. As Shanghai is not the national capital, perhaps its denizens and culture have the instinctive hunger to be the best, just like New York to Washington D.C., or Milan to Rome.
We expected, and looked forward to, the dumplings with hot soup steamed inside with pork meat balls. This time the pastry was thin and melted nicely into the inner ingredients. The cook must have been happy that day making these - it showed in the results. Prawns lightly sauteed and eaten with a dash of chili oil turned out to be appetising. We did not order noodles but relied on the basics - steamed white rice. The rice blended better with the plain looking salted duck cuts, a speciality of the central Chinese coast.
Alex remarked that the better ingredients available in Australia - and the fact that a generation of older chefs in Shanghai had been lost to past political turmoil and emigration - had contributed to his observation that Shanghai food tasted even better here than in its original birth place. For example, the pickled stir-fried vegetable slices reminded me more of Japanese food than my perceptions of Chinese, but when using Australian produce, moved me to another dimension in the mouth.
Chicken giblets, pig ears and duck tongues were cooked in variety of ways and displayed at the entrance, where waiting customers could stare longingly at such dishes. My eyes were drawn to the roast duck - the Shanghai version looked more dry but still delicious, the culinary creation achieved in a very different way from its northern and southern competing cuisines in Beijing and Guangzhou.
We were surrounded by fair skinned diners with sharp features and contrasting dark eyebrows, eyes and hair. Shanghai has a language of its own, apart from Mandarin, and its locals also look slightly different from southern Chinese. They can be the most commercial-minded people in the variety that is China. As Shanghai is not the national capital, perhaps its denizens and culture have the instinctive hunger to be the best, just like New York to Washington D.C., or Milan to Rome.
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