10/29/2025
The first leg of our journey was a restaurant exploration of Shanghai. Shanghai has always felt like the center of China’s commercial universe; that feeling remains. But it is quieter, cleaner and far more functional that when we left it, in 2008. The art deco architecture and tree-shaded lanes of the French Concession remain, but other aspects of life her are almost unrecognizable. In many ways, it felt like stepping into the future.
On to the food. In what seems like a lifetime ago, I used to write about Chinese food here, for magazines and newspapers. Little did I know, twenty years later, I’d be cooking it professionally. Since I left, it has grown far more diverse, at least when it comes to regional Chinese cuisine (international food, not so much). There are dozens of styles of hotpot and clean, artfully designed provincial restaurants serving regional cuisines (the grimy, spicy dives of my memory are few). Because we cook things from mountainous, landlocked places at our restaurant in Montana, we focused on the cuisines of Guizhou, Hunan, Xinjiang and Yunnan. We wandered wet markets, and our guide also took us on a gut-busting breakfast tour of his favorite Shanghai-style dumplings, and shallow-fried buns. We also ate at our friend excellent modern Chinese restaurant Bastard – where the menu wanders from place to place, but is marked by precision and technique (the wine list also kicks ass).
Since opening Shan, I’ve tried to translate the flavors of China to my cooks – the sting of pickled peppers and puckering long beans, the smoke of Hunan’s cured pork; the cumin-laced cookery of the far west; the sour-bright spice of Guizhou. To talk about this food is one thing, but to taste it, here, is quite another.
Anyhow, here are some images of our first few days, exhaustively eating our way through a thicket of restaurants in Shanghai. And now, on to Xi’an.
