by Unknown
I tried two renowned Chinese restaurants that have received considerable attention because of how beautifully they are thought to cater to the needs of tourists. I found 1221 at the end of an alley. The background music was Mexican, and further noise was provided by a loud Brit on a cell phone. In keeping with the restaurant’s reputation for coddling round-eyes like me, my waitress refused to let me order anything interesting. The sweet-and-sour pork was Manhattan takeout. Garlic shrimp was so tame an American friend eating with me happily compared it to the Red Lobster’s popcorn shrimp. (He loves Red Lobster.) 1 7 0
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Service was excruciatingly slow. Although the waitresses dressed like ninjas, in black outfits with red sashes, they didn’t move like ninjas.
Club Jin Mao is the premier restaurant of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, which is in Pudong’s Jin Mao Tower. It is located eighty-eight stories up, but the too-small windows are protected by steel grids, and looking out the windows is like peering from the cockpit of a DC-3. The tables are large and set with flowerless orchids. Napkins wrapped with tasseled cords are the only opulent touch. An optimist might find the Club Jin Mao understated. I found it cold.
My meal began with marinated peanuts, a standard Shanghai snack.
These were superb, which was fortunate. My friend and I ate three bowls while waiting one hour for any of the food we had ordered to appear. At one point we stared longingly at the remains of a huge, slug-like sea cucumber ordered by businessmen at a nearby table. A man has to be ravenous to covet sea cucumber, a repellent creature that should be beaten with sticks and driven back into the ocean whenever it finds its way ashore.
We had, as the menu described it, stewed fillet of Yangtze River fish with sliced chicken and ham in a hot-and-sour sauce. It turned out to be little more than a bowl of hot-and-sour soup. I asked our waitress to point out the chicken. “It’s in the soup,” she said. I asked our waitress to point out the ham. “Sorry, we have no ham,” she said.
The crispy duck wasn’t crispy. The soup buns stuck to the bottom of the steamer, so when I tried to lift them out, they tore and the soup leaked out. The turnip cakes were perfect. I am a huge admirer of Shanghai turnip cakes, which have flaky shortbread crusts and are stuffed with a turnip filling so savory it could pass for meat. As fine as these were, they did not save the meal.
It was no surprise to me that the most satisfying dining in Shanghai turned out to be at traditional Chinese restaurants operated by Chinese. A reality of culinary development in international cities is that any restaurants that are not of local character need to arise naturally from the needs of a thriving immigrant community. Shanghai does not have that any longer. Back in the 1930s, when Shanghai was F O R K I T O V E R
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dominated by international settlements, it had about seventy thousand foreign residents amid a population of three million. Now it has less than half that number of foreigners in an official population of seventeen million. Even the fiercest central planning cannot make up for such an absence of cultural diversity.
I returned to Xi’s Garden, the site of my post-airplane-ride entrail-eating experience. I went back because so much on the menu sounded delicious, particularly the food Wing had refused to order.
My waitress was a young Chinese woman, Christine, who spoke good English and was infinitely patient when I started grumbling that the menu had changed and everything I wanted was no longer available.
She soon figured out that I hadn’t been to this Xi’s Garden but to a different branch. Instead of labeling me an idiot, which would have been understandable, she redoubled her efforts to see that I had a wonderful meal. Thanks to her I had pigeon that was sweetly lacquered, followed by the most entertaining food show in Shanghai: prawns marinating in rice wine dumped over hot stones, releasing a Vesuvian cloud of steam into the air. Next came fried, cumin-laced chicken with sesame-coated hot peppers and a whole fried fish prepared in such a labor-intensive manner it could have been the centerpiece of a banquet.
The fish had been cut into chunks, deep-fried, then put back on the bone. In the Western Hemisphere, diners consider themselves blessed if chefs will go to the trouble to return mashed potatoes to the skin.
Christine hovered over me, fascinated by the presence of a Westerner, as few Chinese are these days. (When my wife telephoned and asked if I was being followed by Communist secret police, I told her that not only wasn’t I being followed, I wasn’t being noticed.) Christine seemed the perfect person to quiz about the nightlife of Shanghai, which is apparently limited to a phenomenon known as KTV bars. I saw dozens of them along Nanjing Road, the neon-lit promenade where concubines once window-shopped while sitting on the shoulders of coolies. I noticed them on street corners near my hotel. Everywhere I went I saw brightly lit KTV bars, and I had no idea what they were.
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I hadn’t come to Shanghai to wallow in decadence, but thus far I was disappointed with my social life. After all, Shanghai’s lighthearted, East-meets-West lifestyle had long ago earned it the nickname Whore of the Orient. I asked Christine who went to these bars and she replied,
“Bad girls. Bad men. If the man drink beer, maybe one bottle for very much money. Then the girl is dancing with the man and they sleep together. The man pay money for the girl.” To maintain my respectability, I scowled in displeasure.
KTV, which sounds like a network affiliate, stands for Karaoke TV.
The notorious and legendary singsong girls of yesteryear who catered to certain manly needs have been replaced by young women practicing the art of karaoke, a notable downgrade in my opinion. I asked Wing to take me to one of these emporiums, and the next day he did.
We were greeted effusively at the door and led upstairs to a large carpeted private room furnished with couches, coffee tables, and a television monitor large enough to do justice to an American rec room. In came a string of girls, led by an overseer the girls called “Mommy,” with trepidation in their voices. We were told to pick a girl, the way we would select a lobster from a tank. What occurred afterward was more ludicrous than libidinous.
My girl was an Asian Alicia Silverstone, which meant she was very pretty and going to fat. She went by the name of Yo-Yo, and I soon learned her father was dead and her mother had lost all their money playing mah-jongg. Our evening began auspiciously when she picked the seeds out of a watermelon slice and handed it to me. I thought, “Now there’s a woman who knows what a man likes.” Then she started singing karaoke duets with Wing. I suppose I should have been jealous, but I was concentrating on the watermelon, which was particularly sweet.
When she wasn’t singing with Wing, she was singing solo. She must have sung the theme song from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On,” four times in two hours. When she wasn’t singing it, a different girl was. I soon realized that one advantage of being on the Titanic was never having to hear that song. I later asked a Shanghai resident who seemed to know about such things to estimate the magnitude of the KTV phe-F O R K I T O V E R
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nomenon, and he guessed six thousand bars employing one million girls.
I learned a lesson that night. It’s no fun spending an evening with a woman whose idea of pleasure is to listen to herself sing.
“I have a turtle foot in my soup,” said one of my dinner guests, a Westerner who had recently moved to Shanghai but was still unaccustomed to the dining quirks. “A foot in your soup,” he added, unnecessarily, “is not right.”
We were at Merrylin, one of the megapalaces that dominate dining in Shanghai. At Merrylin, hostesses who look like Rockettes lead guests from the marbled entrance past Italianate statuary to private rooms decorated with oil paintings of Occidental women strumming ancient instruments.
This dinner had a dual purpose, to eat the famous hairy crabs (only the feet are hairy) of Shanghai and to meet Hui Ren Qiu, a lifelong resident of the city. She is an elegant woman, a former instructor
of English who attended the finest schools of Shanghai, McTyeire High and St.
John’s University, and was forced to leave her home and reside in the countryside during the infamous Cultural Revolution of 1966. Hundreds of thousands of young Shanghainese endured similar humiliation. “I was ordered to seek reeducation from the peasants,” she said, calmly and softly but still offended. “How can we receive education from the peasants? I picked up pig manure. While I am there, I am not allowed to read. It was not allowed. It was all a waste of our time.” She is a neat, trim woman in her seventies who came to dinner impeccably dressed in a brown blazer and camel-colored slacks. She wore a diamond pin from the thirties, or at least an excellent costume-jewelry replica of one, and appeared to have stepped out of a black-and-white movie, until I saw her hands. Under the fingernails of the thumb and first finger of her right hand was a fungus growth she picked up working in those fields.
Hairy crabs, which were in season, are taken apart with exquisite care in a formalized eating ritual that makes the banging and smashing of 1 7 4
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Maryland’s hard-shell varieties seem primitive. The result, in both locales, is a few bites of delicate lumps of meat, but the Chinese are more moved by the experience. They prize their crabs so highly they extol them in poetry (“Chrysanthemum glows in yellow blossoms and crabs are prime”).
I chomped on my pair, one male and one female, liking the roe in the more exalted female but not overcome. Hui, a person of subtlety, ate one of hers with care and wrapped up the second to take home.
A few days later I walked into a small Taiwanese spot called the Bellagio Cafe, expecting little. The prosperous, sophisticated Taiwanese consider their cuisine rarefied and elegant. I consider it worrisome, because dried squid and similar subspecies are always appearing in their dishes. I ate a modest lunch, and it was a revelation.
A dish called Garlic Explosion Shrimp, which consisted of heads-on shrimp buried in a mountain of bread crumbs seasoned with garlic, chili peppers, and bits of dried fruit was the most compelling food I ate in Shanghai. I rated the Bellagio Cafe’s steamed pork dumplings unbeatable until I sampled the pan-fried ones, which were even better.
The restaurant seemed too trendy, too throbbing with music, too filled with young people in black T-shirts to be so concerned with food.
The tables and chairs could have come from SoHo—they had fake-marble tops, aluminum arms, plastic seats. The waitresses were short women with short hair dressed in black-and-white schoolgirl uniforms.
The owner, Claire Lee, at first refused to speak to me. “I don’t know how to answer questions. My English is not good enough. Maybe you come back in a half year.” I explained how inconvenient that would be. She told me all the famous restaurants in Shanghai were the big restaurants and I should talk to those owners because they knew something about running a restaurant and she did not. I praised her cooking, and she replied that she didn’t know how to cook; she hired somebody to do it for her. “When I told my officemates at China Airlines I was coming to Shanghai to open a restaurant, they said, ‘You can only cook tomatoes and fried eggs and you are going to Shanghai to open a restaurant? You should be ashamed.’ ” Lee is a small woman who walks stooped, which makes her seem F O R K I T O V E R
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unimposing, something she is not. The waitresses are munchkin versions of her, but she claims the intention was not to impersonate herself but to create a staff of women whom customers would enjoy but not lure away. Her brother Jimmy, who is one of her partners, explained.
“This is an important concept in China. If you want waitresses, they must not be beautiful or ugly. You must have them in the middle. They cannot be ugly, because you must provide customers something for their eyes to enjoy. But if I am a rich man who comes in here and sees a beautiful waitress, I ask her how much she earns per month.” Added Claire, “I don’t think a beautiful girl stays here long.” Bellagio Cafe has twenty-two tables, miniature for Shanghai, but it is open from eleven a.m. until four a.m. and the tables are turned, in restaurant parlance, nine times. I had five meals there, but often it was only a tuna sandwich. Americans occasionally require tuna with mayo on white bread, even amid the bounty of Shanghai.
I came upon remnants of old Shanghai by following the laundry. Near a few undistinguished streets, wash hung in alleyways or dangled from trees. I found these neighborhoods irresistible. I suppose those who mourn the passing of old Shanghai should be considered no more than sentimental wretches. I count myself among them.
Here I would find pan-fried soup buns offered for pennies apiece.
The shops along these lanes are family run, or so they appear, and offer multiple services. My favorite combined bicycle repairs and unrefrigerated farm-fresh eggs. I regularly saw people walking about in paja-mas because their only set of clothes was hanging out to dry.
Rickshaws no longer roam the streets, and at one time eighty thousand rickshaw pullers worked in Shanghai. Bicycles, including Shanghai’s legendary Forever brand, are abundant, but Wing told me he expected bicycles to be gone from the streets within five years, supplanted by motorbikes. In restaurants women still place their purses on the seats of their chairs, leaning back against them, rather than on the floor. This is more out of habit than necessity, because the tradition of spitting in dining establishments is fading away.
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My hotel was situated in the old French Concession, a remnant of the era when the Europeans bent Shanghai to their will. I came upon little that was remindful of those days, although a remarkable exception was the Old China Hand Reading Room, a dark, quaint, and curious retreat resembling the parlor of a grandmother who never airs out her house. I ordered a Coke float—standard Coke, terrible ice cream, magnificent ice-cream-parlor glass—for the high price of three dollars and browsed through stacks of old magazines. One of them, a 1991
copy of China Tourism, talked about the opening of the Yangtze River Delta and the displacement of the simple Pudong residents: “The way the villagers spoke was unaffected, which was in sharp contrast to the sagacity of the Shanghainese.” The Old China Hand Reading Room is surely the original Barnes & Noble, the prototype of refreshment-ready bookstores to come.
So much is gone from Shanghai: the booming trade in silk, tea, and opium. British imperialism, French culture, Russian decadence. The pimps, hoodlums, drug runners, smugglers, and profiteers who came to ply their trades have turned to other Asian locales. Yet the future of the city seems assured. Only matters of the table remain in doubt.
Hong Kong became celebrated for its food even though it offered little but Cantonese cooking, but Shanghai has officially embraced culinary diversity. Its leaders have made it clear that home cooking alone will not do. The Chinese food of the city is masterful, but the Western cuisine does not measure up, and there’s too much of it to ignore. As an international dining capital, Shanghai falls short. To be fair, I cannot blame Communist authorities for all the dreadful Western food I sampled. No dish was more appalling than the goose-liver and chocolate terrine at the Peace Hotel, a dish that was probably on the menu back when Noël Coward took up residence and wrote Private Lives.
For that foreign-devil food item, I blame the Brits.
GQ, june 2002
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The remark was breathtakingly frank. “We do not allow whites,” said the soft-spoken woman manning the phones at the Chicago headquarters of the Nation of Islam. Hearing me inhale, she diplomatically amended her words: “Caucasians are not allowed in the mosque.” She could not have been more cordial. I had called the offices of Louis Farrakhan’s Muslim sect to find out how I might attend a Sunday meeting at the national center, the Mosque Maryam. I thought it would make an intriguing afternoon: lunch at the Nation’s new five-million-dollar South Side restaurant followed by services at the mosque.
Once I learned I would be barred from the meeting
, I wondered if my plans to review the restaurant, Salaam, were also in vain. What if no whites were allowed there? Restaurant critics seeking anonymity have been known to employ disguises, but this would be a tough one to pull off.
Actually, I didn’t think even Farrakhan could get away with segre-gating his restaurant—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took care of that.
Still, I didn’t want to be forced into some kind of reverse-discrimination demonstration, sitting at the Salaam lunch counter, demanding service.
Back to the telephone I went, this time to call the restaurant. An even more polite young woman answered the phone. Not quite knowing how to word this, I stammered, “Do you . . . ummm . . . accept . . .
ummm . . . white guests?”
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This time, it was my words that caused distress. The woman took a moment to regain her composure before assuring me that indeed they did.
I learned something from all of this: racism isn’t as simple as everybody thinks it is.
Not only am I white, I’m Jewish. Should you be under the impression that all white folks are equally distasteful to Farrakhan, you haven’t been listening to his commentaries on the Jews.
When he’s in a good mood, he likes to say that he has no problems with the Jews. Unfortunately, he’s in a bad mood a lot. Want to really get him riled? Just remind him that the Jews are the Chosen People. The man can hardly get through a public appearance without Jews upset-ting him. Now, Jews go out to eat all the time, and no restaurateur in his right mind would ever say such terrible things about such outstanding customers, but Farrakhan apparently can’t help himself.