Shanghai: a City for Cuisine Exploration Shanghai offers a dazzling variety of food and provides and opportunity for cuisine exploration by learning to use chopsticks. Stylish dining is one area where Shanghai leaves Beijing in the dust. Eating out in Shanghai is about more than just the food: it is a social lubricant, a time when families get together and a major form of recreation for Shanghai’s chic elite. While friends in the west go out for a beer, the Shanghainese will choose a meal punctuated with numerous shots of rice wine. Even if you are a regular customer at your local Chinese restaurant back in America you won’t necessarily find yourself at home with Chinese cuisine in China. You’ll find no fortune cookies or chop suey in Shanghai and only the occasional prawn cracker. Most top-end Chinese restaurants in Shanghai have some kind of English menu but even these don’t include the more interesting dishes. Go with your Chinese friends and let them order. In general it is always better to eat Chinese food in a group as you’ll get a better variety of dishes. Restaurants often have set meals for a table of 10, which is especially useful if you have to hold a banquet for some bigwig. Chinese habitually over-order. Most Chinese eat early, at 6 or 7 pm, but lots of trendy late night Shanghai-style eateries buzz 24 hours a day. If you are on a tight budget, it’s worth knowing that some of Shanghai’s most famous restaurants often have a cheaper, less fancy downstairs option serving snacks and cheaper main dishes. Also check for extra charges like tea and napkins and send these back if you don’t want them. Epicureans will tell you that the key to ordering Chinese dishes is to get a variety and balance of textures, tastes, smells, colors and even temperatures. Most Chinese will order at least one cold dish, a main dish, and a watery soup to finish off. Note that both soup and rice are normally served at the end of a meal as fillers, so if you want them to come first you’ll have to tell the waiter. Lying along the eastern coast of China and being one of the country’s five biggest port cities, Shanghai have been thronged with traders from all over the world since the Opium War and have been densely populated by inland immigrants and foreign business people ever since. In the wake of economic growth, the major Chinese regional cuisines poured into Shanghai one oater another. By the 1920s, nearly a hundred styles of restaurants featuring Cantonese, Sichuan, Beijing, and many other regional foods, and even Buddhist vegetarian food and Muslim feasts, together with Shanghai local dishes and Western cafes, had emerged in Shanghai. “Satisfying eating in Shanghai” is actually not a recent expression, but was in use as much as 150 years ago. Shanghai style cuisine is actually a mixture of Chinese regional cuisines and it has indeed brought together the different local tastes, cooking techniques and specialties. Moreover, since the economic reforms and opening up to the outside world, Shanghai has become China’s biggest international metropolis. Western style cafes, bars and restaurants have been mushrooming, where local residents and international visitors can find authentic German beef burgers and beer, French snails and wine., Russian pottage soup and caviar, Italian macaroni and spaghetti, Japanese sashimi and sushi, Korean barbecues and kimgee, American fried chickens and doughnuts, Mexican Tacos, and many, many others.