jeff yen

Since I’ve come to Shanghai, I’ve heard various reports of the Avocado Lady (a.k.a. Arugula Lady, Basil Lady, &c.), the expat nickname for a woman who runs a small grocery stall near the French Concession. She’s so named because her store is one of the few places in town where you can actually get fresh avocados for relatively cheap (11RMB each, which works out to around $1.60).

She seems to have cleverly cornered the market in that part of town for "exotic" produce like basil, arugula, limes, avocados, and so on. Likewise, she supplies cheese – fresh mozzarella for 17RMB per round, buffalo mozzarella for 53 – and a variety of other goods more often found in Western kitchens than Chinese.

So it’s been a vague goal of mine to visit ever since I’ve heard about her. Today, having really nothing better to do, I decided to take a look and see what all the fuss was about.

The shop is situated near the French Concession, a part of Shanghai well known for its comparatively dense population of foreigners, so her decision to stock items popular with Westerners is not surprising. What is interesting, however, is that her prices are quite a lot cheaper than her competition. It’s actually difficult to do an apples to apples comparison here. She doesn’t actually have any direct competition, since… even more interesting… to best of my knowledge, nobody else is doing this.

To be fair, it wasn’t quite perfect. The basil, while about 1/4 of the price of the basil at the Shanghai Metro superstore, had almost as many bruised, blackened leaves as not. Digging down into the bag for fresher specimens helped somewhat. The endive/frisée and arugula were likewise kind of wilted and sad.

The "parmesan" ( ba ma / 巴马 or ban ma chen / 斑马臣 – phonetic translations that, literally translated, could respectively mean "sticky horse" or "I pledge allegiance to a zebra" ) cheese was in fact Gran Moravia, a Czech product more akin to a cross between cheddar and romano. That’s fine… it works just as well in most applications as a stand-in for Parmesan, and most – myself included – would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in a completed dish. If I had an oven, I might even consider substituting it for gruyère in a batch of gougeres. You know, just because I like to live dangerously.

The prices on canned goods were fairly typical, maybe one or two RMB short of the prices I’ve seen in major supermarket chains; i.e., nothing special. I’m guessing this is because the prices on all imported canned products reflect import duties, which are criminally high in China, so she can’t get around those like she can on locally sourced produce.

The strange thing is, and the source of not a little cognitive dissonance on my part, this place has the imported goods of a large supermarket or boutique store, and the atmosphere of a local fruit stall. A scrawny black-and-white cat wanders around the aisles, idly batting at my hand when I try to pet it. A sweating block of cheese sits unattended on an upturned plastic crate, accompanied only by a knife of questionable cleanliness. Prices are unmarked, and apparently variable. I asked the owner’s assistant what the price was for the… parmesan… cheese; 60rmb per half-kilo ( jin / æ–¤ ). When I was ready to buy, I asked the owner; 55.

It was great.

The owner seemed nice enough, but Sunday was obviously the wrong day to visit. She was harried and a little snappish, as the place was crawling with customers, mostly foreign. One man showed up, filled a sack with about 30 avocados, paid, and left without saying a single word. Others lingered, tripping over produce and each other in the narrow aisle, moonstruck at the array of foreign goods on offer.

Seeing as I have no food processor (or substantial enough knives) with which to make pesto, and no tortilla chips (or corn tortillas to make chips, or masa flour to make tortillas) to eat with any theoretical guacamole, I opted to go for a couple of simple salads, with an eye for reuse.

Picked up a container of Spanish olive oil and a can of chickpeas (chickpea-parmesan salad, hummus), a couple of tomatoes, some fresh basil (insalata caprese, basil stir fry, omelets, thai curry), a red onion, one fresh mozzarella round, 1/3æ–¤ of gran moravia, and a lemon. All told, 86RMB. Not bad, and the olive oil and cheeses took up 62 of that.

The olive oil is… certainly not the worst I’ve ever had, but with a name like "El Toro" it was fighting an uphill battle anyway. I would describe the aroma as halfway between a rich, fruity, full-blooded olive oil, and fermented kerosene.

Next time I’m just going to bite the bullet and spend a little more on a brand I recognize.

The tomatoes were simultaneously rather soft and not exactly bursting with flavor. Woe, woe for the days of the North Park farmer’s market, where heirloom tomatoes were practically free for the taking.

I was planning on taking a look around the French Concession – I suppose I should give it a chance, eventually – but the mozzarella wasn’t going to wait on me, so I ended up getting right back on the subway. Brief stop at the supermarket to pick up a baguette and some more dragon fruit ( huo long guo / 火龙果 ) and I was set.

Dinner was a solitary affair. Christine’s gotten herself hooked on World of Warcraft, and now seldom leaves her room except to go to the corner store for some sushi, and Ellen’s working all weekend.

So, you know.

More for me.

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Credit for my actually being able to find this place goes to the Shanghai Dolls weblog, and their map.

274 Wulumuqi Zhong Lu, near Wuyuan Lu
乌鲁木齐中路274号, 近五原路
Google map

5 minutes’ walk from Changshou Lu (常熟路) subway station (metro lines 1 and 7).

P: +86 64377262