jeff yen

7/1/2010: Lotus Land

"Holy crap, this is good," she mumbled through a mouth full of chicken makhani.

Sunshine, as she likes to be called ( yang guang / 阳光 ), reached out with her spoon for more.

"It's not soup!" Ellen and I advised her, after watching her inhale about four spoonfuls of the rich curry while using her naan as a trencher. "You can actually try eating some of the bread too, it's quite good with the sauce."

She poked at the now soggy piece of dough doubtfully for a moment, then picked up her spoon with a determined set to her features.

"I like the sauce," she announced, resuming the attack.

-------------

It's actually not very often that I get to eat a nice meal out in Shanghai.

The problem is not that there is a shortage of excellent restaurants (decidedly not the case, contrary to my initial impression), nor that all the places worth eating at are inhumanly expensive (only by Chinese working class standards). It's simply that, given my schedule, my meals normally consist of something grabbed for 2 to 3 RMB on the street when I happen to remember that I'm hungry, a banana I've been carrying around in my man-purse for the last two days, or a set meal from whatever fast food place is most convenient to where I happen to be working that day.

That, and my friends are equally busy, and I'm not about to make the effort to go somewhere nice on my own.

Tonight, by that mysterious temporal alchemy from which the most satisfying social encounters spring, my friend Sunshine was in Shanghai for a kind of hostel owners' conference, and my friend Ellen had the evening free. I decided to take Sunshine down to one of the more famous art/shopping districts, Tianzifang (田子坊). Sometimes also known as Taikang Road ( taikang lu / 泰康路 ), it is one of those historically funky, atmospheric areas where artists gathered to open small boutiques to sell and display their sculptures, paintings, crafts, and food. With increasing numbers of tourists in Shanghai, and the general increase of the city's wealth, it has developed in recent years to become more of a tourist attraction, with a higher proportion of foreign visitors than local, and a corresponding increase in prices and premium brand chain stores.

So the local artists have generally moved on to cheaper, dingier pastures, while more profitable cafes, wine bars, and restaurants tend to fill their places alongside the brand-name boutique stores.

While a disappointment to many local Shanghainese, it remains an interesting place to take a visitor to the city, and a great place to find a good quality Western meal -- albeit at a price premium.

After window shopping for a while with Sunshine, Ellen showed up on the 9 train and we settled into a routine that I've found remains virtually the same regardless of your location: deciding where to eat. Eventually, I discovered that Sunshine had never tried Indian food, so thinking that the heavily spiced Indian fare would agree with her central Chinese palate, we made our way back to Lotus Land.

We were greeted briskly but politely, and invited upstairs. Following the maitre'd, we sidled through a crush of servers and patrons, up a narrow staircase, and into a swirling room full of golden light, dark wood, cardamon, and cumin. We were seated quickly at one of the corner tables, lounging on cushions on the raised platform, and placed our order after fifteen minutes of watching our waiter desperately scrambling out of the weeds.

Sunshine having never eaten Indian food, and Ellen having no particular preference, the ordering was down to me; I picked a few traditional favorites that should be fairly safe, and give Sunshine a good introduction to Indian flavors: chicken makhani / butter chicken, a vegetable biryani, palak paneer, aloo gobi, and a couple of naan.

The aloo gobi appeared first, and on its arrival the meal could still have gone either way; the potatoes were crisp on the outside and tender inside, dusted with aromatics, and glistening with clarified butter. We all took a bite and then let our forks lay still, waiting for the rest of the food. It was perfectly seasoned and delicious, but… there was none of the expected cauliflower anywhere in this dish. Cauliflower being a fairly expensive ingredient in China, I could understand why, but it didn't bode well for the rest of the meal if the chef was cutting corners like these.

The chicken makhani appeared next, and all my doubts dissolved in the creamy, nutty, heavily spiced gravy and fork-tender chicken. I breathed a sigh of relief, and smiled when I heard Sunshine's amazed "holy crap!" ( wa sai / 哇塞 ) after her first taste. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the chef had actually used cashews as the thickener instead of cornstarch.. those aren't cheap.

This was the one I was worried about most. Things like butter and cream, which share center stage in this dish, are not quite the staples in China that they are in countries with thriving dairy traditions, so in many restaurants there is a marked lack of creaminess in cream dishes, or butteriness in butter dishes. Most Chinese bakeries' cakes lack body and depth of flavor because they simply replace much of the butter with vegetable or soy oil, and jack up the sugar content to compensate. On the other end of the scale, when a chef (pastry or otherwise) does get free reign with dairy products, they often go overboard -- I once had a slice of 'cheesecake' that was literally just a wedge of cream cheese on a sponge cake crust.

Next up was the palak paneer. The flavour was rich and deep, with a maddeningly elusive smoky undertone that I couldn't quite place. The cheese was real palak, firm and mild, and not the random cheese substitution so common in China (Sunshine had once asked me if I knew how to make pizza… when I told her I had everything I needed but cheese, she promptly presented me with a five-pound block of swiss cheese).

I reverted to my normal mode of eating Indian food; each bite a scoop of curry on a slice of naan. Looking over at Sunshine, I saw her plate was a single dejected piece of naan, slowly sinking into a gradually homogenizing mire of orange and green sauces. There was definitely a faint manic gleam in her eye as she plied her spoon, and the tip of her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth as she reached out for another bite of butter chicken was just the perfect finishing touch.

Ellen, laughing at us both, was probably the most civilized of us all, dipping a spoon demurely into the curries while Sunshine and I attacked each dish with single-minded ferocity.

The biryani, last to arrive, was a pleasant if unexceptional variation. In truth, I think its only failing was in comparison with the spectacular curries on either side.

We passed a happy hour and a half, lovingly soaked up every last smear of curry with biryani and naan, and adding our own laughter to the happy and blessedly smoke-free atmosphere.

Sunshine is fairly typical of most Chinese I've met, in that she's -- at least initially -- not terribly eager to try new kinds of food. Chinese food is steeped in thousands of years of tradition, which I think may tend to stifle their culinary imagination somewhat.

I've seen a few food competitions here, which purport to pit the best chefs of China against each other. Each one of their dishes has been done a million times before, and there is a clear reluctance to try something daring and new. So many of these competitions essentially become beauty contests, to see which chef can make the best looking radish rosettes, or carve the most elegant turnip swan. The food itself is reduced to a formula; the recipes are so exactly known that there are no surprises there; it is either right or wrong.

So it is endless gratifying when I can introduce my friends here to something genuinely new; whether or not they like it (Jing Jing was not overly fond of her first taste of a Big Mac), I can almost see their borders expanding, and they're always just a little more willing or eager to try the next thing.

At any rate, Lotus Land was a resounding success. The food was well executed, the atmosphere was better than most, and the company was superb.

2 curries, vegetable biryani, 2 naan, and aloo gobi: 197RMB / $29 US

------------------------------

Lotus Land
2nd floor, Tianzifang #12, 274 Taikang Road
泰康路274弄田子坊12号2楼 近瑞金二路
+86 021-54652743

------------------------------

 

Random picture time:

My housemate Christina was temporarily kicked out by her (temporary) roommate Marina who was making an early night of it, so she decided to nest on the window seat in my room and surf the net for a while. I told her she looked like a tiny prostitute living in a garbage dump, which she took with great good humour.

Incidentally, she's from Wuhan, speaks fluent English, just arrived from Beijing to see what this Shanghai business is all about, and is a web designer (I think). Apparently she just got an invitation to compete in some kind of beauty contest, so now she's going to the gym every day, researching runway walks, and checking out clothes online. But she still eats microwaved hot dogs and Orion cakes (the local equivalent of Hostess' cupcakes) for breakfast.

Whenever I bring this up, she waves a hand impatiently at me and walks away.