Old Shanghai

We had dinner in Chinatown again over the weekend. Last Thursday, during our after-dinner stroll, we had passed a restaurant called “Old Shanghai”, and the menu had looked interesting…

Our intention was to have a light meal, but as usual, we ordered a little too much food. We had the Shanghai-style fried noodles and Shanghai-style fried rice, together with several other side dishes.

The noodles were tasty – one of the best dishes of the evening. Hand-pulled fresh noodles stir-fried with strips of lean pork, wood-ear fungus and caixin (green vege). Yummy but oily.

I’m a fried rice person. I can have fried rice every week. Must be remnants from spending my formative teenage years in boarding school and more years in the UK as an undergraduate, where at that time, Chinese food mostly meant fried rice and sweet and sour pork! Unfortunately, this version of fried rice was rather lacking. It was tasty enough, but rather deficient in wok-hei (hmmm… how do I translate this? It’s that wonderful fragrance that is imparted to the rice when there is sufficient heat in the wok. This wok-hei is next to impossible to get at home, as the flames on our domestic gas burners just do not provide sufficiently intense heat. This is what makes fried rice – good fried rice that is – in restaurants so tasty). I also couldn’t see what made this fried rice typically or specially Shanghainese. It looked rather Singaporean to me! But I was satisfied anyway My fried rice fix for the week.

We shared a small bowl of the hot and sour soup. And boy, was it sour! It was almost like drinking vinegar! You know that sensation one gets in the glands at the back of the throat when tasting something really vinegary? Sort of like fingernails running across the blackboard type of sensation? Yeah, that was what it felt like drinking the soup.

The pork and veggie wantan (soup dumplings) were a complete contrast. Ha ha! The dumplings looked and tasted like they were cooked and served in plain water. Sorry, no taste of stock or broth here. The tiny saving grace was probably the dumpling skin. It looked rather thick, but was very soft and smooth.

We of course had to order the signature Shanghainese dish of xiao long bao (small steamed pork dumplings with broth). The two hallmarks of a great xiao long bao? Skin that is thin and translucent yet strong enough to hold the broth in the dumpling without breaking, and broth that is generous and tasty. Both these take a lot of skill and experience on the part of the dumpling maker. These dumplings had slightly thick but okay skin, however, the broth within was rather bland and the meat filling very, very fatty – maybe 70-80% fat with little lean meat.

The biggest disappointment of the evening rounded off our meal. Deep fried carrot pastry. They looked really delicious, with a crispy, flaky crust. But the copious amount of grease oozing from the pastry didn’t settle well in the stomach, and the radish filling was definitely an acquired taste.

Oh well, at least now we know...

It was a beautiful evening out last night, with the night air cooled by the earlier rain. So here’s another night scene… a snapshot of the food street in Chinatown - the al fresco food stalls outside the restaurant. These are the sanitized version (oops, except for the incriminating evidence of Singaporeans who had failed to clean up after themselves!) of the push carts used by the itinerant hawkers of old, who would move through the narrow streets, selling piping hot noodles and porridge to laborers and passers-by. It’s always great to sit under the trees and a canopy of twinkling stars (most of the time) and eat satay (BBQ meat skewers), char kway teow (fried flat rice noodles) and spicy BBQ sambal sting-ray. Food somehow always tastes better this way. Maybe soon…

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