美食 · MĚISHÍ
Xiaolongbao or shengjianbao, a breakfast gone by ten, hairy crab in season, and how to order from a QR code you cannot read.
⭐ Xiaolongbao are steamed, thin-skinned, filled with pork and hot soup, eaten from a bamboo basket. Shengjianbao are thicker, leavened, and pan-fried so the bottom is crisp — and they are the more particularly Shanghainese of the two. If you order one expecting the other you will be disappointed by something excellent.
⚠️ Both are full of scalding liquid. Bite a small hole, drink, then eat. This is not a refinement; people burn themselves on these constantly.
Shanghainese cooking is sweeter and more soy-heavy than most Chinese regional food. Look for 红烧肉 hongshaorou, red-braised pork belly; scallion oil noodles, which are three ingredients and completely addictive; drunken chicken, cold and poached in wine; and soup noodles for breakfast.
⭐ Hairy crab is the seasonal event — roughly October and November, steamed whole, eaten with vinegar and ginger, and taken extremely seriously.
The "four warriors" of a Shanghai breakfast are sold from small shops and hatches in the morning and gone by ten: fried dough sticks, soy milk, a rice roll, and a griddled flatbread. It costs very little, it is what the city actually eats, and it is the easiest authentic meal to have here because nobody is aiming it at you.
⚠️ Many restaurants have replaced menus with a QR code on the table. You scan it, order in the app, and pay there — which assumes a working Chinese payment app and a phone that handles the language. A translation app with a camera mode covers the gap. Pointing at what someone else is eating remains completely acceptable.
⭐ Nobody tips. Not in restaurants, not in taxis.
⚠️ Harder than it looks. Vegetable dishes are frequently cooked with pork stock or lard, and "no meat" may be understood as "no visible pieces of meat". The reliable exception is Buddhist temple cuisine — Longhua and the Jade Buddha Temple both have restaurants, and they are strictly vegetarian by definition.
What counts as a Shanghai breakfast A Shanghai breakfast is bought outdoors, eaten standing up, and gone in ten minutes. It usually means some combination of youtiao (fried dough stick, 油条), soy milk (doujiang), scallion pancake (cong you bing), and cifantuan. Cifantuan is glutinous rice wrapped around a youtiao and preserved vegetable. Xiaolongbao and shengjianbao … Read more
Xiaolongbao is a steamed, soup-filled dumpling with a thin, pleated wrapper. Shengjianbao is pan-fried, sits on a yeasted dough base, and carries less liquid inside. Both are pork dumplings native to Shanghai. But they behave differently in your hand. That difference should decide which one you order first. Visitors often assume the two are the … Read more
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