Street food and seafood of Shanghai

I have been in Shanghai for a few days now. I have been eating non stop. Good thing I have been walking a lot too. My favourite types of food are street food and seafood.

For breakfast instead of cereal, I would get a couple of steaming hot vegetable and meat buns with a cup of freshly squeezed soy milk.

For lunch I would have the one and only Nanxiang (南翔) steamed dumpling. Their flagship resturant is located within Chenghuang (城隍) Temple. There is always a long lineup for these delicious bit size of heaven. The buns are sold in 16 per serving and I ate them all!







For dessert I would get my favorite childhood treat: candied hawthorn. So much better than candied apple.




For afternoon snack, I would get a savory or sweet pastry baked in one of these clay ovens. When biting into the pastry, the ultra crispy shell is first thing that hits my lips. The flavour are locked tight inside, so what hits the taste buds on my tongue is the completeness of what went into that little pastry. It doesn't get any better than this. I also highly recommend clay oven baked sweet potato. The bits that gets caramelized are the best.



The perfect dinner to me is a seafood feast. There are a few streets in Shanghai full of nothing but seafood restaurants with fresh seafood on display outside.















Winter is best time for hairy legged crabs. I have eaten so much crabs since I got here that my tongue is all cut up. People believe hairy crab has a lot of "cold" element or chi. Hence, tons of ginger and garlic are put into the dipping sauce to balance out the cold and make sure you don't catch a cold.





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Location:Shanghai, China

ShangHai Knights

A few days back at dinner, we talked about how we are glad there is only one more train ride left on our trip. We ate our words hard when we hopped on the train from Beijing to Shanghai. It was like we had stepped into a space ship. Everything was white and really clean! Our bedding didn't smell musky and didn't itch to the touch. Every bunk had a TV with remote panel and headsets. We even had a hot water jug and garbage can. The washroom not only was open all the time, but also not the size of a tiny closet and didn't smell like pee. We didn't want to leave our 5 star train when we arrived in Shanghai in the morning.

My cousin Sophia picked us up and took us to the hotel. After a short rest, we hopped on the metro and headed to the famous Shanghai Bund.

We walked through Nanjing Road to get to the Bund. Nanjing Road is like Robson St in Vancouver, but 20 times bigger with 50 times more people. As soon as we stepped onto the road, we were bombarded with "bag? t-shirt? belt? Gucci? LV?". Much like some shops in certain malls in Vancouver, these street hustlers have "secret" backrooms (or more like another world!) to showcase their wide variety of very well made designer fakes that bedazzles any tourist looking for a deal.

To our disappointment, when we reached the Bund, the area was all blocked off due to World Expo 2010 construction. We couldn't see anything other than the top of the Pearl Tower through the dust. The Bund stretches one mile along the bank of the Huangpu River. Back in the day, this area was an international settlement which explained the various very European or Westernized architectural styles. Across the river is the PuDong Business District which provides the best skylines at night. After a very Shanghai dinner, we checked out the night scene from the PuDong and HuangPu River.

The next day was more shopping and food. We went to where we can do both: ChengHuang or City God Temple. It not only refers to the large temple complex, but also the traditional district of commerce in the city, surrounding the temple. There are over a hundred stores and shops in this area, and most of these store buildings are nearly a century old. The shops had every imaginable souvenir you can think of there from magnets, chopsticks, combs to personalized dough figurine. But no shot glasses to the disappointment of one of our travel mates. Lunch consisted of very yummy Dim Sum dishes. My cousin suggested we give a seafood a try for dinner.

After a quick drink at XinTianDi, a very trendy bar district, we arrived at the seafood street called TongBei Street (PuDong District). The whole street was nothing but seafood restaurants. Everything about this place was an instant sensory overload. The smell, sound and bright neon lights was China at its best. Buckets of live seafood are on display outside of the restaurants which you can just point and order your dinner. You can even get snakes! The restaurant we picked was called MangLingGe (满灵阁大宝海鲜排档). But due to overcrowding, we were seated almost right on the street next to our future dinner. When cars drove by us, couple of us had to get up to let it through. We ordered drunken shrimp (yes, the shrimps were uncooked, but soaked in cooking wine and spice), clams, raw clams, snails, oysters, sea mushrooms, fish and so much more. All of us agreed that was the best meal we had in China. But that wasn't just a meal, it was an experience, the quintessential China experience.

Tomorrow we wake up early for our trip to Yellow Mountain!