Today has been an interesting day for me. In virtually every respect it was fairly boring, but nevertheless for some reason it made an impression on me. I did some work, went to the gym but didn't work out (forgot my ID card), did some more work, talked on the phone, and came home for dinner.

I guess dinner was a little non-standard.

After a trip to a Carrefour yesterday, I've been armed with a few things that I can't normally find in China. In fact, I had to seriously control my urges in order to leave there with even enough money for the subway ride home.

At any rate, that haul put me a handful of shrimp and some mushrooms short of a bowl of Tom Yum, or a few vegetables away from a pot of green curry.

So I hit the street market today after work for some curry fixins. Got back to my apartment and my fake kitchen, whipped out my handy pocketknife, and started peeling and slicing. Nothing says "temporary living arrangements" like having a 3-inch folding blade as your primary kitchen knife.

Midway through food prep, Christine came barging in (she has very few other modes of locomotion) and said I absolutely had to come and see the view from her balcony. Sean chose that moment to join us, and we all agreed the view was good enough to warrant a minor photographic frenzy.

Twenty minutes later I had a pot of green curry happily bubbling away on my induction stove, and a couple of roommates wafting through my door on wings of curried steam.

So we made a party of it. Pulled our chairs out to Christine's balcony, pooled our starches together, and had dinner lit by the Shanghai skyline.

By the way, it turns out that Thai curries go with baguettes just as well as Vietnamese curries do… i.e., very.

Afterwards, we sat around picking our teeth and each others' brains, which was unsurprisingly a fairly food-centric affair.

We're all foodies to varying degrees. Christine, while resting more on the consumption side of the equation, has nevertheless perfected an astonishing array of cooking techniques centered around the microwave, and Sean's a world traveler who's picked up more than his fair share of cooking smarts. He described his version of a paneer which had us all salivating, even having just stuffed ourselves with ungodly amounts of curry, french bread, and fried rice.

The interesting part of the conversation came when we started discussing Wuhan's variety of restaurants, or lack thereof. This led to a cursory examination of how successful, for example, a Chinese-American owned and operated gastropub might be, with a healthy selection of fairly authentic Asian and Western dishes.

This is a conversation I've had many times, both in- and externally, with a fairly wide assortment of people here, from friends and fellow foodies to former restaurateurs.

The thing is, I know just enough about cooking to know that I know nothing about cooking, especially professionally. Sure, I can whip up an array of passable curries (from two cans and a fistful of fresh veg) or fried rice, or even invent a half-decent dish once in a while ( try jicama stir-fried with five-spice beef… it's actually pretty awesome ). But to cook quickly and above all consistently, day after day, in a high pressure environment, is not a skill I've ever developed. Nor do I know anything about running a restaurant, which is a rather larger and more putrid kettle of fish.

But, you know, I keep going back to that thought, that it might be… fun.

"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.

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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

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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

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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.

This is part of a series of posts that are going to detail my time as part of a week-long, five-star-studded, guided group tour my father arranged for us. Initially I thought it would be a short trip around Shanghai, and agreed to go in the hopes that maybe… just maybe… my dad and I could spend some quality time together.

…Yeah.

In any event, the posts are going to come more or less in reverse order, since the trip is almost over and I’m writing what’s most fresh in my mind at the moment. There’s going to be more exposition in the posts to come, since explaining how these tours actually work at the business level is something I’m going to reserve for when my impressions get drier and I’m bored of writing about the whole thing anyway.

Pictures are also coming, when I get a chance.

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Seeing the now-familiar Shanghai skyline approaching in the distance, my heart lifted. I knew it was just a matter of time before the bus would stop, the tour group would file off one by one at Cheng Huang Temple (cheng huang miao / 城隍庙) -- a famous shopping district -- and I would be off on my own to meet up with my friend Susan (xiao ye / 小也) for dinner, which I anticipated would be the first satisfying meal of the week.

 

I'm not exactly sure when Susan and I became friends, or how; one night I was casting a jaundiced eye over her and what I assumed to be her boyfriend, quickly dismissing them as yet more of the many spoiled offspring of Chinese nouveau-riche wandering around Shanghai. The next thing I knew we were chatting every night over beers and endless baskets of french fries, or playing Liar's Dice in fancy Shanghai nightclubs with nine or ten of her girlfriends while sleek German businessmen in Italian suits stood nearby, eyes bloodshot with alcohol and envious lust, buying us all drinks.

In a perfect illustration of how not to trust initial impressions, Susan is fascinating. She has the stellar education and multinational background that is a natural result of her father's wealth, but that she did not take for granted... a rarity among privileged youth (myself included). Somehow, Susan's father instilled in her a true appreciation for work by -- and she even admits this is strange -- letting her do whatever she wanted, frequently adding his own whimsical brand of humour to the mix.

One of her endless supply of childhood stories involves her borrowing a schoolmate's pair of coveted shoes. She then promptly buried them in the backyard, hoping they would germinate and grow into a tree that would bear more shoes as fruit. Her father stood by and watched wordlessly, cigarette in hand. As she patted the last handful of dirt down over the shoes, he called the gardening staff over to make sure they got enough water.

Now she's a photographer at a Shanghai style magazine and apparently helps manage a staff of artists and editors. Since nobody at the company has asked her age, she doesn't have to deal with people questioning her based on the somewhat astonishing fact she's only 22.

At any rate, our time now is limited to sharing rare meals and the even rarer alcoholic bender, making plans for trips that will never happen, and talking about meals we'd cook if her roommate, craving French fries the previous month, had omitted the final step of burning down the kitchen.

Tonight, we'd decided on Thai food.

My father, ever the organizer, kept asking me when and where my friends were going to meet me, and I could only shrug in response and say I didn't know. This frustrated him so much that he eventually decided to just leave well enough alone, which I think was the most prudent option.

Once we reached the shopping district, I bid goodbye to my father and walked off in a random direction, eager enough to get away from the tour group that I waited until they were out of sight before asking a stranger on the street the general route to get to People's Square. Susan hadn't gotten off work yet, so I'd decided to visit my friends at the Etour youth hostel before dinner.

It was exhilarating, in a small but significant way, to finally be able to just walk, on my own terms. I didn't have to check my stride to match the octogenarians in our group, I didn't have to constantly double back to make sure I hadn't ventured too far forward, and I didn't have to search for our tour guide's waving flag in a sea of nearly identical banners.

I went down side streets and alleys, past street stalls selling "man tou" buns (man tou / 馒头）, revealed in sudden whirling plumes of steam like gently exploding clouds as shop owners enticingly lifted the basket covers. Old men, many still dressed in pajamas, sat in the street playing cards as half-feral dogs tumbled joyfully with their grandchildren nearby. I stepped over the occasional puddle of filth, into one art gallery and two curio shops, and around more than a few beggars. After a week of forced conversation with the kind of people who enjoy guided tours through a sanitized world, it was pure joy.

 

The sun set slowly over the skyline, and I took a quick compass bearing to make sure I would stay on track to my target, the distant Sauron's tower looming over People's Square... the Shanghai J.W. Marriott. Not so much because I needed to, more because it reinforced the feeling of being out on my own rather than simply treading in the footsteps of a tour guide and 200 retirees.

Half an hour later, I reached the massive five-star hotel. Pausing briefly to avoid being run over by an impatient Ferrari, I walked past it to a side alley which led to the youth hostel, and stopped to exchange a few words with the milk-tea vendor, who was sitting on the curb with her family, braiding her daughter's hair as her twin sons chased each other around the neighbouring fruit shop.

Sipping a milk tea, I stepped over the hostel's threshold to Lang Lang's incredulous cry of "What the hell are you doing here??" and a quick hug across the counter. We chatted quietly about tours, fathers, and life in general until Susan sent word that she was on the road. I said a quick goodbye, as they all are these days -- farewells hold less and less meaning with the knowledge that I'm always within an email or text message's reach of any of my friends in China -- and hopped into a taxi.

 

Susan and I met at Ma Boon Krong restaurant not far from People's Square in Shanghai, where the food was just a cut above average as far as Thai food goes, but absolutely mind-blowing compared to what I'd been subjected to for the past week.

Pork padh-see-ew, slithering with oil and sweet soy sauce, basil and onions slowly wilting among fat rice noodles shot through with golden clouds of egg. Green curry, a strange nuclear-bright variety that I suspected was tailored to Chinese palates, had far more sweetness and less spice than what I'm used to, the curry's flavour almost drowning in rich coconut milk.

The green papaya salad was a joy, tossed lightly with lime juice, fiery Thai bird chilies, garlic, and fish sauce. It was meant to be wrapped in lettuce, but I soon dispensed with the unwieldy leaves and started eating the stuff plain.

A papaya milkshake and red-bean coconut jelly cakes rounded out our table. We ate until we could eat no more, defiantly took a few more bites, and finally fell back in our chairs, burping contentedly and gazing benevolently at the devastation through heavy-lidded eyes.

After the long day, and a week of 6AM wake-up calls, I'm afraid I was even more of a desperately boring dinner companion than normal. Luckily, Susan and I are comfortable enough to not have to keep a conversation going, and we were satisfied with making occasional fun of the performers on stage and appreciative mooing noises at the food.

 

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Mingtown Etour International Youth Hostel
No.55, Jiangyin Road (江阴路55号)
Huangpu District, 200003
Puxi, Shanghai, China
T: +86 02163277766

Ma Boon Krong Restaurant
Hong Kong New World Tower, 4th floor ( 香港新世界，4楼）
Huai Hai Zhong Lu #300 (淮海中路 300号）
Puxi, Shanghai, China