Orient Expressed

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.

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.

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.