Shanghai Bites:

From China Daily, January 11, 2007:

Disappointed xiao long bao aficionados will find that the venerable Jia Jia Tang Bao is no longer located at Henan Nan Lu and Wenmiao Lu, where it stood for many years, dishing out near-perfect soup dumplings to long lines of lunch patrons before the neighborhood was demolished.Happily, Jia Jia Tang Bao has relocated to a new no-frills outlet, still serving what are considered by many to be the best XLB in the city. Try the traditional pork (RMB 6/15) or crab (RMB 16.5/15). The buns are smaller than some in the city, with a translucent shell enveloping delicately flavored soup that’s fresh and not oily. Like all masters, the chefs at Jia Jia make it look easy-just wrap, soup and filling-but anyone who’s spent time searching knows that the perfect XLB is the product of rare art.

Jia Jia Tang Bao
Open time: 6:30am-afternoon. No cards.
Location: 90 Huanghe Lu, by Fengyang Lu
Tel: 021-63276878
Cost for two (excluding drinks): RMB 22.5

In searching for a particular dish I wanted to try in Shanghai (I’ll leave it to you to guess), I stumbled across Weird Meat, a blog by reformed vegan Michael Ohlsson. It’s such a gem I can’t believe it hasn’t come to my attention before. Michael’s a former San Franciscan, a current Shanghai resident and looks a mensch, so I’ll forgive him for dissing Shanghai cuisine generally (though he liked the vertical pork bone).

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Shanghainese love doujiang (soy milk/soy milk soup) at breakfast. There’s a sweet version which is served either hot or cold. The cold version is ubiquitous in its grab-and-go transparent plastic cups; you usually have the hot version at sit-down places, but it’s still just plain soy milk with some sugar added. Who likes that? (Well, a lot of people, apparently.)

The savory version is something else; properly done, it’s a masterpiece and food for the gods, IMHO. It’s hot soy milk to which has been added vinegar or some other sour matter to curdle it (surprisingly, soybean milk curdles much like cow’s milk) and salt and/or a salty agent (the best versions will have brine shrimp in it). Chili oil is usually also present, so with the salty, sour, and spicy combination you’d need only have to add a little sugar to make “Strange Taste Doujiang” but I don’t think I would like that. Beyond the above ingredients, other vegetable matter such as scallion tops may be added, and it’s sometimes served with a bit of Nori-type seaweed on top. The other indispensable ingredient is slices or broken pieces of you tiao, the Chinese cruller, floating on top. (It’s a good thing the do with stale you tiao.)

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(Originally posted on chowhound.com June 5, 2006)

On a recent whirlwind visit to Shanghai I felt duty-bound to survey the state of Xiaolong bao in its native habitat as best I could in the time I had. I hit perhaps 10 places ranging from XLB’s cradle at Cheng Huang Miao (disappointing) to the Pudong Airport food court (surprisingly good).  The but the nitty gritty in a nutshell (no, not literally) can be summarized in three points.

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(Originally posted on chowhound.com on April 10, 2006)

Sloppy XLB at Xiao Loong Restaurant

April 7 is Xiaolong Bao Day, by my own proclamation, commemorating my 1992 xiaolong bao epiphany at the very Shrine of Xiaolong Bao in Shanghai. A planned trip to Shanghai for early April to got postponed, so I decided to make a Xiaolong Bao Week out of it anyway here in the Bay Area. All told I hit seven places for XLB over nine days including two weekends, with a break for Opening Day (no XLB at AT&T Park yet) and one other day when some small emergencies took up my time. All of the seven were in San Francisco except for Shanghai Restaurant in Oakland. All were solo lunchtime visits, around 1:00 PM in approximately the same state of hunger, and featured only xiaolong bao accompanied by salty soymilk soup (xian doujiang) where available and one usually one other snack item. Four were places I had been in the past, and three were new.

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