The Fantastic Pain, and Terrible Meals, of Shanghai’s Old Restaurants

I like to hurt myself. I’ve been doing it for a while. But my choice of masochism is not cutting my arms or drinking until I wake up in the bushes outside Perch. It’s more sinister. I hurt myself by going to bad, bad restaurants. Restaurants I hope will be good but I know in my heart are going to be like swallowing a bowl of razor blades. Terrible, awful restaurants. Yes, I am addicted to laozihao, officially “time-honored” restaurants. The model citizens of the restaurant world, as held up by the people in power. They are the worst of the worst.

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The First Time

I went with a friend. We were both food nerds and had been reading too much history. We figured we’d try as many of these “time-honored” restaurants as we could in a day. We were Brothers in Pain. We started at Xiao Shaoxing, the poached chicken restaurant on Yunnan Nan Lu, where, in the 1980s, they used to slaughter the birds on the street to advertise their freshness. We followed some cheesy Official Guidebook to Shanghai's Best Restaurants, full of "official" recommendations based on, it appeared, nothing. We ended near what is now IAPM, but back then was still a construction site, eating fishy three-shrimp noodles.

At each restaurant, we descended into a new level of depression. Our conversation withered and died as the disappointment swelled in our throats. If the food was edible, the environments were hostile. If the environments were okay, the food was malevolent.

After perhaps eight restaurants, we had nothing more to say to each other. We were full of hate — at ourselves, for being carried away by the history — and shame — for the restaurants decades past their expiration date. We finished in the late afternoon. I went home to lay on my couch, silently, for the rest of the weekend.

We didn’t speak to each other again for days.

The pain was exquisite.

The Second Time

My friend had moved away (not because of our outing — I think). It was several years later. I needed to feel that pain again.

I had a great idea. I would find an expert in Shanghainese cuisine and let them inflict that experience on me. Part of me wanted them to succeed, to prove me wrong, to navigate this old restaurant and find something of value to it. Part of me wanted failure.

Zhou Tong, an author, was my man. Zhou was in his fifties, a skinny guy with smoker’s teeth and a soft spot for Lao Fandian, “The Old Restaurant”, near Yu Gardens.

Zhou did well and Zhou did terribly. This time, the food was decent — a Shanghainese soup called zaobo tou, an ugly (but delicious) log of a sea cucumber — but the company was excruciating. Zhou turned into, not an expert, but a pedant, lecturing us about the “proper” way to eat a river shrimp and yelling at the waitress for not being familiar enough with the sea cucumber dish.

He led us through the kitchens, eerie and almost empty during what was supposed to be the lunch rush. The chefs we talked to sounded trapped on a sinking ship, rearranging the mix of sugars in the flash-fried shrimp while they waited for someone to save them, because, really, what else could they do?

The pain of that lunch was more acute, more annoying, like a broken tooth with an exposed nerve. I enjoyed it tremendously. I never spoke to Zhou again.

The Third Time

The third time was earlier this month. It had been years since my first and second laozihao sessions, and life was going too well. I needed a reminder of the dark side. I needed laozihao.

So while you were out enjoying the sunshine of early spring, I was in a dark place. Four dark places.

Xinya (新雅茶室) opened in 1927 as a Cantonese teahouse with dim sum just outside the Concessions, in a pocket of Sichuan Bei Lu home to several Cantonese restaurants. At the time, there were two dominant “bang” — or business circles — in Shanghai: the Cantonese bang and the Ningbo bang.

The Cantonese were big in department stores and trading. The Ningbo bang were finance people, mostly. As the Cantonese bang’s fortunes rose, their food was accorded more status, and their restaurants became fancier. That’s when Xinya moved to Nanjing Lu.

In its early days, Xinya was famous for its curry chicken, made with Indian curry powder, coconut milk and butter. In its middle days, during the Cultural Revolution, when it was renamed The Red Flag Restaurant, it served only three dishes. For more than a decade, the menu was: tofu and shredded pork soup, stir-fried bok choy and caifan, the vegetable fried rice.

If anything, Xinya is booming now more than ever. It’s a seven-story building with an attached hotel and when I went for lunch one Saturday, I had to wait in line. The curry chicken is no longer available, and, really, neither is any of the Cantonese food. It took some work to cobble together a vaguely Cantonese order — flaccid roast meats, uncrusty baozaifan, passable gulao rou — from the super-thick Shanghainese menu. It has transcended its roots and found new life, even if most of the customers are, let’s say, of an earlier generation.

After reading so much about its rich history and Cantonese beginnings, I left disappointed but hardly in pain.

Wang Bao He (王宝和) started in 1744 as a Shaoxing wine shop, later adding crabs, because crabs go well with Shaoxing wine. I went to the “original” on Fuzhou Lu the other day and found a 277-year-old zombie. No, it was not crab season. But there are still plenty of places in Shanghai selling crab dishes that are not as bad as this.

The tofu with crab and clover with crab were edible but sad. The slippery drunken crabs were slightly better. To their credit, the waitress refused to serve a steamed crab because she said they couldn’t guarantee the quality, which sort of echoes back to the stories of how, in the early 20th century, when you ordered a crab, they put it on a piece of glass. If the crab could walk across glass, that meant it was strong and healthy; if it couldn’t make the walk, you could pick another one.

But there was one other table in the entire place, and a torpor had settled over the dining room. At one point, during the 1960s, this restaurant was considered so fundamental to the city’s restaurant culture that it was renamed, simply, The Shanghai Restaurant (上海酒店). Perhaps Wang Bao He comes alive in fall, when the crabs are fat and ready to eat. Right now, in Spring 2021, it’s only good for masochists like me. The pain was broad and slightly suffocating, like a heavy blanket of nails. It made my evening.

I couldn’t find definitive info on the start of Lu Bo Lang (绿波廊), the hulking restaurant next to the Nine Turns Bridge and Yu Garden. Most info points to it being a teahouse (known as Le Pu Lang) in the early part of the 20th century; one source suggests it was later turned into an office. Its modern roots start in 1973 when Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia came to China after a 1970 coup forced him out of his own country.

In Nanjing, he was served a 12-course dim sum meal, so Lu Bo Lang decided they would beat that with 14 pieces of (really small) dim sum. That was the foundation for the space being turned into a proper restaurant and given its modern name in 1979. It’s been the preferred show horse for state visits ever since. Queen Elizabeth II has been here (1986). The Clintons famously ate lunch here (1998). More recently, Emmanuel Macron visited with the Chinese leader.

Lu Bo Lang finished a major renovation in 2020, and it’s pretty nice inside these days, in emerald and Tiffany Blue. Not that most customers care — this is an old-timer’s favorite for old-time Shanghainese dishes and a few pastries.

I went for lunch, hoping to repeat the famous 1973 dim sum feast. The closest I could get was a 9-piece pastry box, full of little proto-wang hong dim sum shaped like a handbag, or a longevity peach, or other fruit.

Many, many places make nicer, cuter, more delicious, more realistic “faux” dim sum these days. If I was 60 years old and full of Shanghainese nostalgia, I might have appreciated it more. I’m not.

Lu Bo Lang soured my lunch date. My guest and I bickered for the rest of the afternoon. It was, in its continued annoyance, like a fantastic bee sting, swollen but sharp. Afterwards, I went to Polux, which was not painful at all. I think I preferred the handbag pastry.

My last stop was De Xing Guan (德兴馆), another famous old restaurant ruined by the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history, and how delicious the pain was.

I spent 400rmb on a lunch of their signature dishes — braised pork, knifefish noodles, xiao long bao, intestines on clover — as glossy and gloopy as they were inedible.

Knifefish are extremely expensive and only used to make soup broth. De Xing Guan’s tasted like aquarium water. The xiao long bao were worse.

I brought a Shanghainese friend who used to be a frequent customer; he refused to eat a single dish. I couldn't bear to take a single picture.

This, this!, was the pain — a complete, whole-body sting — I had been seeking.

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In southeast Asian Buddhist countries, meditation on death and sometimes around corpses is not uncommon. There is a word for it — Maranasati — and a gory nine-step instruction in the Satipatthana Sutta about cemetery contemplation. During Lent, Christians mark each others' foreheads with ash and say “Remember you are dust; to dust you shall return.” And in ancient Rome, a special slave used to whisper “memento mori” — “remember, you will die” — into the ears of generals after victory in battle.

In Shanghai, for every new and exciting “contemporary Indian restaurant” or “modern Chinese tasting experience” that is born, there is a stooped and bent “time-honored” restaurant on its way to the grave. It is the cycle of life.

Laozihao remind us to stay humble; we are all going to the incinerator sooner or later. They are, in their way, the memento mori of the China restaurant world. And God, are they painful.