Orient Expressed

Fair well cruel world

2007-07-25T13:36:04Z

Alas, as you will have gathered Orient Expressed will be expressing itself no longer as our correspondent has run off to Japan to learn the ways of the Samuari. Still, hopefully it entertained and enlightened and fret not because there's some damn good stuff available on the Caterer Blog, Kitchen Rat and the Editor's Blog that you should check out instead. And don't forget Caterersearch for all your news and information needs pertaining to hospitality.

The finer things in China

2007-05-30T14:37:44Z

From the low-brow to the high brow. I swapped the plastic bibs for starched napkins and the braised crayfish for beautifully steamed shrimp tonight, at Family Li Imperial Cuisine on the Bund. The occasion? Li being the first Chinese restaurant (in China - in fact may be Chinese restaurant anywhere) to be accepted into Relais & Chateau (R&C). Perhaps this is not such exciting news in the UK, where R&C has a staid and old-fashioned reputation (although this is, it must be said, hardly something they are ashamed of, I would imagine, judging by the properties they choose to be members - uh oh, you know what I mean, the properties, not necessarily the cooking - take members like the Fat Duck and the Vineyard, not old fashioned at all... er, let's get back to the evening). But here it is another little detail signifying everyone's obsession with being here. ]]> Michelin of course have only just managed two cities across the Atlantic, but they are dabbling with Tokyo and one wonders how long it will take them to open up shop here too. Or whether anyone here would give a monkey's nut sack. Of course not, they'd prefer to cook it instead. Back to the point. Imperial cuisine was a good contrast to the mess and noise of last night's meal. This is the food that in many ways sums up what restaurant dining means to many Chinese people: impressing those you are with. There are a number of set meals, ranging from RMB400-800 for lunch per person, up to around RMB2,000 per person for dinner. This is about £130, or without wine, roughly equaling a rip-off. Ok, so there are lots of courses, but it does not have any of the magic associated with a really special meal. But then expensive food here is not necessarily the most exquisitely tasting. On the menu tonight, for example, was the obligatory shark's fin soup. I have mentioned this before, but the shark fin thing is awful. It's not just the terribly cruel way that each fin is hacked off and the alive creature thrown back into the sea to bleed or be eaten by other sharks to death. It's the fact that the resulting dish doesn't taste of anything besides chicken broth anyway. There is no point to all that savagery. People with disapprove of me saying this, but at least with foie gras you get something that makes you want to cry with the pleasure of it. Anyway, shark fin consumption is on the rise as the country gets richer, but there have already been some calls for action, which is encouraging, not least when it comes from the state press. (This leader is quite funny, in as much as it can use a communist-style attack on the rich to launch its own attack on shark fin soup). Also disappointing was the abalone. I've had these prized snails at the seafood market drenched in garlic and served in the shell and it was much better. Here, just braised and served in a dribble of the soup it was bland, and the girl from Relais & Chateau looked a bit uncertain as she nibbled at it. Lobster (imported from Australia) and grouper (soft and strangely earthy tasting) weren't much better. Apart from a round of starters, if I was paying for this I'd feel gutted.

March of the Crayfish

2007-05-30T14:27:13Z

Xiao long xia season has arrived and the city is tearing these little crayfish limb from limb. It's not pretty but it sure as hell is tasty, and on any given street you can see hitherto civilised people jostling and pushing their way to the front of queues that lead into the bustling canteens where the little crustaceans are being served. This is not a rarefied experience. After waiting half an hour for a spot, you get marched to one of the formica tables and are packed in, sat down and given a menu. ]]> Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film has just hit the cinemas here, perfect timing for one set of heroes in a half shell to rise up from the underground.) Indeed I have heard lots of reports of people getting ill the day after. But I have also heard lots of people say, "Well who cares if i get a little ill, they taste so good." Now you know you have hit culinary gold if you get your guests talking like that.

Shark-fin soup

2007-05-17T11:38:56Z

It was off to the Tongchuan wholesale seafood market again this weekend. It was the third time I have been and it is one of the best nights out you can have in Shanghai. The place is chaotic, huge and dirty, and it makes our own Billingsgate look like the Harrods Food Hall. However like Billingsgate it functions as the city's wholesale market. But unlike Billingsgate it is also like a giant restaurant. ]]> kuai (just under 3 pounds) for a jin (500g) of flower crabs, which is probably the same price as in the UK wholesale, or a bit more. But then again we don't go there expecting wholesale prices - and, well, the beer is still about half the price, so there. You then pay the restaurant to cook each fish by weight, but that's next to nothing anyway. Recently we have worked out taking our own butter, which we have the kitchen melt down for us, so we can just dunk the roughly cracked shells in and suck the goodness out. It's not exactly Chinese, but we are getting abalone too, turbot steamed with ginger garlic and spring onions, and lots of white fish in a steaming chilli bolstered hot pot too - so we do ok on that front too.

Paul Pairet at Jade on 36

2007-05-10T10:50:42Z

Last week a friend came over from London for a week with his girlfriend, to visit me of course, but also to celebrate his birthday somewhere a bit different from the White Horse in Brixton. He wasn't disappointed, not least because we went to the Shangri-La's fine dining effort, Jade on 36, for his birthday blow-out. Now hotel dining in Shanghai is often tarred with the same brush as hotel dining is all around the world. There are lots of eat and drink all you can Champagne brunches (good value, but not exactly discerning) and "Global-village-world-food-stations" where cuisines from everywhere from Kerala to Kentucky are shoe-horned into a menu. But at the Shangri-La they have managed to create a restaurant that means business, both in terms of those looking to impress their guests (a view across the financial centre Pudong or back to the West and the Bund) and those who come looking for serious food. ]]> Gordon Ramsay or a Joel Robuchon, but a relatively unknown French chef called Paul Pairet. Pairet comes from Montpelier but first came to Asia in the early nineties. Now in his early forties, he has built a strong reputation in Shanghai for an innovative approach to flavours and the odd madcap piece of presentation. The menu consists just of tasting selections, four in total but with each of the four available in four-, six- or eight-course versions. I had a kind of sardine parfait with pain epice (actually the weakest of what was to come); then sashimi presented on long, bendy metal stalks (resembling those goggly eyes we used to wear as kids); an incredible dish which simply topped toasted brioche with truffle and a foamy version of beurre meuniere; a giant prawn steamed for 45 minutes in a kilner jar (which it is also served in) with lemongrass and orange juice; a beef rib cut right back so three inches of the meat remained in the middle of a totally clean bone and then roasted and served with a eggy pureed potato; and then wonderful puddings. Now Pairet uses lots of foams and all those agents and chemical tricks beloved of the new school of kitchen wizadry. But his menus are also simple, and show off one idea per dish. But how good is each of those single ideas? The foaming beurre meuniere on bread and steamed prawn dish were both creations that made me put down my knife and fork in the hope that I could drag out the act of eating each mouthful for a lifetime. Anyway, I really share all this because it also made me wonder about Asia and Michelin stars. I know this is like those hypothetical debates seven year olds have about whether He-Man would beat Spiderman ("yes", by the way) but if Michelin did ever spread the New York experiment further around the world and came to China, on current standards I reckon Jade on 36 could be worth two stars. And I'm not sure there are any others who could match that in Shanghai, in a hotel or otherwise.

Snake wine

2007-05-01T14:01:14Z

I had the pleasure for the first time last week of tasting snake wine. Myself and a colleague went on a midnight bike ride to research a story he was planning on "Shanghai Afterdark". Before you snigger and roll your eyes, the concept for this was family friendly - well, not that you'd necessarily be taking your five year old out at 3am in Shanghai, but you know what I mean: above board, legal, something you'd tell your mum about. We didn't want to talk about clubs, restaurants, and, er, massage parlours and bathhouses. They get enough attention in the press here already. ]]> kuai (60p) and got a glass each of this delicacy. Not that there is anything delicate about it. The "wine" used is baijiu, distilled from rice, wheat or sorghum. It's a potent brew, and possibly the cheapest rocket fuel known to man. The Shanghainese and all of China love it, and it is a vital element to the signing of most business deals - being able to take repeated shots is an essential skill to getting ahead here. Anyway the combination of baijiu and snake was pokey to say the least. Herbs, spices and what looked like several blades of some aromatic grass were all in the jar with the snakes, and the resulting brew was bitter, astringent and not something I'd like to sample too often. The point of snake wine is, as far as I can tell, the same as most other grisly Chinese eating customs: to improve male potency. Whether it works, I'm afraid I cannot possibly report. As I said, we're very professional here and the assignment didn't allow it.

Jean Georges Shanghai

2007-04-19T10:38:27Z

One of the treats in my life in the last few days (actually, in the last few months) was to go to Jean Georges Vongerichten's restaurant here in Shanghai - when the great chef was in town. Jean Georges, as the restaurant is called, is consistently spoken of as one of Shanghai's best places to eat, and I am not going to disagree. While there is a lot of debate about whether acclaimed chefs can successfully roll out a fine dining concept around the world, Vongterichten has, in Shanghai at least, proved you can. The chef has a collection of enough restaurants in his adopted city New York (nine), as well three or four others dotted across the US, a few in the Bahamas, one in Paris, two at at 50 St James's in London, and this one here. Not all of them are fine dining, and he has several different concepts, but it testament to his skill and business brain that he can make it all work. In fact it was just after I'd read an article about Gordon Ramsay's teething problems in NY, that I was sitting down to Jean Georges in Shanghai, about to have one of the best meals in recent memory. The food is heavy on the Asian influence that has typified much of Vongerichten's cooking. There was picked crab with a mango foam, king fish sashimi with frozen wasabi balls, a more provencale-inspired with fish placed over jerusalem artichoke hearts and tomato, but still ablaze with scents of spice, and a chocolate dessert flavoured with cardomom. ]]> Vong (somewhere I never ate at) failed in London. It was, of course, at that time when anything in the UK tagged as "fusion" suffered against the backlash surrounding chefs who tried to mix influences. Maybe it was just wrong for London; in Shanghai, where the cliche East meets West actually rings true, the borrowing of so many different flavours seems at home. Also, in his executive chef here Eric Johnson, he has a super talented cook. And that may be the secret of the restaurant's success. The tasting menu, seven courses plus treats, cost around £50, which felt like a steal. And you know that when a chef has charged some of the highest prices in Shanghai and still made you leave his restaurant tapping your wallet with a smile rather than a frown, he has succeeded. The only slight gripe was a couple of service mishaps, unfortunately very much the norm in China - at least when you walk into a western restaurant expecting western standards. But considering the super cool interior, all dark lighting and decadent banquettes, a wine list of some 5,000 bins, plus a hand shake from the man himself, and I can count it as one of my most satisfying feeds in a long time. Vongerichten to develop new restaurant concept with Starwood>> The Vong Way>> Food according to Jean-Georges Vongerichten>> Spice man>>

Family Fortunes

2007-04-05T15:49:56Z

Excuse the delay in posting this latest entry. I've had my mum and one of my sisters to visit. They arrived at the weekend and have been cooing and gawping their way round the city since. That tall building syndrome thing again. For these two however the skyscrapers have really gone to their heads - or at least the gins and tonics and white Russians served within the skyscrapers. Whereas most people go on pub crawls, these two have made it a personal mission to visit every sky-high bar in town. ]]> Excuse the delay in posting this latest entry. I've had my mum and one of my sisters to visit. They arrived at the weekend and have been cooing and gawping their way round the city since. That tall building syndrome thing again. For these two however the skyscrapers have really gone to their heads - or at least the gins and tonics and white Russians served within the skyscrapers. Whereas most people go on pub crawls, these two have made it a personal mission to visit every sky-high bar in town. They are hitting Cloud 9 on the top floor of the 87th floor of the Grand Hyatt (in the Jinmao Tower) tomorrow, they have sipped Champagne in the 789 bar on the top three floors of the new Le Royal Meridien, and they seem to have turned the JW Lounge at the JW Marriott into their local (they are not actually staying there, which would surely be a surprise to their new friends the bar manager and concierge).

Having them here has also reminded me how much entertainment the food can provide here. I took them to something of an institution in Shanghai, a restaurant called Dongbei Ren. The restaurant is named after the region in the north (bei) east (dong) of China, where the food is a heartier affair than further south - not necessarily spicy, but full of richer meat dishes to shut out the numbing cold that cloaks much of that area for a large part of the year. Anyway, among the lamb and mutton dishes (more prevalent further north, both in the east and especially in the north west, on account of that region's Islamic influence), the beef, and aubergines served with a sauted potatoes, there were silkworms. These had the pair of them giggling and wincing in equal measure - I felt like I was back in the UK watching Carol Vorderman about to devour witchetty grubs in "I'm A Celebrity". I wasn't allowed to order them.

I will though. And I'll tell you about it. I know discussing "weird", "alien", "no-way!" food is a cliche, but who cares. It's only a cliche because there's a shared fascination with eating the strange, the unusual and the downright disgusting, and so people like talking about it. And, thus, so will I. So far I haven't got further than chicken's feet. They are pretty good, and on a par with pigs trotters - obviously. Ok, without quite as much to get your tongue round, but still with that lip-smacking gelatinous quality and concentrated flavour of the chicken in question (as pig trotters have with a pork flavour) that any carnivore would warm to. As has been explained before, it is not the flesh that is so satisfying (there is none) but the crunch and chew of each metatarsal and the way it releases little bursts of goodness. Why the UK and America ships all its chicken feet over to China is now a mystery to me. I think there's a new garnish you are all missing out on...

There will be boundaries I am not willing to cross though. Monkey's semen (because it could potentially be the most tragic way to contract a STD); ducks' tongues (because I don't see the point); and braised ox penis, to name a few. Now this last one I have been, I admit, tempted by. They serve it in the Xinjiang restaurant at the end of my road, and when the icy Shanghai winter was so biting it was making me feel the pinch in my own privates, back-up from what would surely have been a pretty well-packed ox seemed like it might be a good idea. Fortunately on that occasion a delicious spicy dish of roasted hare nestled in a basket of dried chillies came to my rescue, as I came to my senses...I left with my modesty in tact. On second thoughts they say you should try everything once. Hmmm, I might wait till the folks have gone home. Eating ox penis is not the sort of thing you want to do in front of your mum.

Eating out everyday in Shanghai

2007-03-28T08:26:04Z

Eating out is part of Shanghai everyday life, full stop. When there are places, literally holes in the wall, where you can get lunch for 20p (40p if you splash out on pork balls) then why would you go through the bother of cooking? Certainly not at lunchtime when instead of eating something cold and then reheated that you've dutifully brought in from home, you can eat something mouth electrifying, fun, and I think possibly medicinal. Jing'an Temple) where lunchtime sees a queue of 50 or so people waiting their turn for one of the very limited places inside. It's a low margin high volume business model though, and no sooner have people slurped their way through the noodles than they are up and out, leaving the seat free for the next one. Anyway, today I was trying to shake off the last of particularly snotty cold. I'm no microbiologist, but I think the warmer weather here - the temperature change - has woken up several million strains of tropical germ, which had previously lain dormant in the icy Shanghai winter. The cold thanks to several people coughing over me (and truth be told, me over them), plus I had had a few late nights and been smoking far too many of the 30p-a-pack Chinese brand ciggies, and, well, it had all caught up with me. But bored with the snivelling I headed down to one of the two (not sure of its name, or even if it has one) and picked up my mini shopping basket. Tooled up, I headed to the small table where the raw materials are arranged and sorted the basics first: two half-fist-sized knots of dried noodles, then to the fungi section for a stick of wood ear frills and a bunch of enoki, and finally a few leaves of baby bak choi (this is not what the Chinese call it here, but my Mandarin is not that specialised yet - sorry, watch this space). Then the treats: pork balls and a stick of hard boiled quails eggs. You hand your bounty to the man, and all this gets decanted from your basket into an individual metal basket, which is then placed in a big vat of spicy soup, along with everyone else's. Three to five minutes later it's ready, and is then topped with a generous spoonful of crushed garlic and chilli flakes, plus a huge handful of freshly chopped coriander. All this is doused in even more soup and then wrapped up in a polystyrene bowl and plastic bag for you take back to your desk. Half an hour and about half a roll of loo paper later, the bowl is finished and my blocked-up nose blown away. It was a spicy, aromatic soup - or broth really - that is infused with flavour from all the vegetables that have been cooking in it all day, and then given an extra kick with your own additions. The chilli gives a rich heat, and the coriander is an eye-waterer, but the whole effect is cleansing. I swear I felt better for the rest of the day. I certainly didn't have to blow my nose again. While I'm not quite ready to embrace some of the more extreme elements of traditional Chinese medicine (deer penis wine for libido, say... though I'm not, of course, saying I actually need that one, ok?), but in most of China and in Sichuan Province in particular they swear by the healing powers of spicy food. Certainly chilli is meant to be antibacterial and on this evidence its hard to doubt. Raw garlic has always done the trick for me anyway when I feel a cold coming on, so combined in this kind of concoction, those sickly little bacteria didn't really stand a chance. And all at a fraction of the price of paracetamol or a visit to the doctors. Ha! ]]>

A new food and travel blog from Shanghai called Orient Expressed

2007-03-27T08:11:04Z

Let's get a few things straight before we go any further. It's true, here in Shanghai there are a lot of very high buildings. You probably will have heard about them. Every time a foreign journalist is dropped into Shanghai to stoke up the fires of this, possibly the most hyped city in the world, and then return home to write something sensationalist and nine times out of ten wrong, they always mention the buildings. ]]> Jin Mao Tower, the soon to be ex-tallest weighs in at 420.5m high. But the cranes on the new World Financial Center here have already overtaken it. That one will be 492m. And it's not just height. On my side of the river there is a new Le Royal Meridien which looks like either a cyber-stag or a praying mantis. There is a JW Marriott which has four pincers perched on top. A smaller (and older) Radisson has a flying saucer perched on top, like one of those sherbet sweets. And at night each one competes in a display of neon, tracer lights and illuminated boxes of glass. If you wanted to make money here, you would do it in neon. Anyway in the end either the neckache or their familiarity gets the better of you, and you stop looking. But they are proliferating all the time remain, often beautiful, occasionally very ugly, but always spectacular. Secondly, contrary to the western obsession that Shanghai is home to the new super rich in China there are still a hell of a lot of very poor people walking around, earning well under what the United Nations has set as the global poverty line at - one dollar a day. As a result, one block away from the £1,000 shoes in the Prada boutique and the outpost from Jean Georges Vongerichten on the Bund, there are street stalls selling pork-stuffed fried dumplings and lamb or chicken wing kebab sticks, each costing about two kuai (pronounced kwai) - around 13p. This is a city where you can eat food cooked to the highest Western standards (more of which in the months to come) and on the other hand explore the vast (and I think in the UK, still largely untapped) riches that are Chinese regional cuisines. China is enormous (over 1.3 billion people) but luckily for me, in terms of its food, it has all been condensed into this (itself pretty massive) city. And so despite the changes that happen here every day, and the reports that obsess over the new shops, the KFCs, the Pizza Huts, and despite anxieties in some political quarters that Shanghai is becoming too western, the city still feels without doubt Chinese. I'll do my best to share as much of it as possible.