Zhou Tong holds up a small river shrimp in his chopsticks and asks a simple question. “How do you eat a shrimp?”
He’s taken the shrimp from a classic Shanghai dish, you bao xia, river shrimp quickly fried in their shell, head and all, with sugar and sometimes soy sauce. He pops the whole shrimp into his mouth, chews and then shouts. We are having lunch at Lao Fandian, and the table, laden with dishes, shakes as he slams his palm down. “CUO! CUO! WRONG! WRONG!"
Zhou, 51, has written two books about the history of Shanghainese food, known as benbang cai, and is about to publish a third, "Speaking Through Pictures: Benbang Cuisine," which aims to, in his word, “teach Chinese how to eat again.”
Zhou has the neatly parted hair and square glasses of a government official, an impression that quickly gives way as he starts talking about food, and becomes passionate and animated, obsessive bordering on pedantic. I’ve asked him to lunch to see what restaurant a man who is both a cynic about Shanghainese cuisine and perhaps its greatest supporter would choose. He’s picked a tourist trap.
Lao Fandian, literally The Old Restaurant, is a four-story restaurant that dates back to 1875, and one of a handful of marquee names aimed at the tourists visiting the nearby Yu Gardens and Temple of the City God. In a dozen years in Shanghai, I’ve never considered going.
My impression, before eating with Zhou, is that like many of the city’s once-great restaurants with long histories, restaurants and shops China calls time-honored brands, is that it is probably long past its expiry date, propped up by tourists who don’t know better and nostalgic residents who remember these restaurants as they were before being gutted by the political and economic swings of the past 50 years. I’ve been to a number of these lao zi hao, as they are called in Chinese, and always been disappointed. In 2016, Lao Ban Zhai, another lao zi hao, was called out by a Japanese TV show for having the worst service in Shanghai, a scandal that forced it to close for five days and apologize to the public.
Zhou will change this impression for me while putting a point on exactly what went wrong. He is old enough, and started early enough, to meet many of the old master chefs, the ones who learned their craft in a different era.
“Shanghainese food has to be protected,” he tells me at lunch, his self-appointed mission. For more than a decade, he’s been coming to The Old Restaurant about once a week, shepherding it through a long process that resulted in its cuisine being recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage, though it’s unclear what, if anything, this national title actually means. He tells me he’s working on a project to record videos of the remaining master chefs, a group of old men imparting their knowledge as they cook in his studio, chefs he has spent years befriending and convincing to open up about their cooking secrets, once passed from master to apprentice, a system on its way out.
In the kitchen at Lao Fandian. (Photo by Brandon M./SmartShanghai.com)
“I’m doing 280 videos with them,” he boasts, and I ask him how far along he is. “Well….,” he says, “I’ve been preparing for three decades, but, uh…” He puffs on a cigarette and deflates a little himself. “Hopefully I can start this year. I don’t have any money.” The chefs are not getting any younger. A few die each year.
If there is a reason that The Old Restaurant’s food has survived the Cultural Revolution, when all restaurants were ordered to cook food “for the masses”, and then the state-owned period, when workers were assigned to the restaurant and its kitchen regardless of interest, caring only about their meager paycheck, and then privatization, when this beaten-up dinosaur now had to compete with tens of thousands of new restaurants for customers, and the current period, where Zhou believes fast food has hollowed out the last vestiges of tradition, it is Li Borong.
Li, who died in 2016, was one of the last great masters of Shanghainese cuisine, the chef of another lao zi hao, De Xing Guan, for many years, before retiring at 60 to come steer The Old Restaurant back to some respectability. He spent the last decades of his life overseeing the kitchen of The Old Restaurant, acting as the honorary master chef to its cadre of new and old cooks, including Luo Yuling, the 38-year old current chef of the restaurant. Li’s influence is still felt across the city; his apprentices man the woks at Shanghai’s better benbang cai restaurants.
Many of Zhou’s stories — and for three hours, he does nothing but tell stories — involve Li. My favorite is the one about zao bo tou, a yellow broth now sitting in front of us, that involves Shanghai’s most famous gangster and a soup full of pig guts.
Zao bo tou soup. (Photo by Brandon M./SmartShanghai.com)
It was 1949 and Mao Zedong was just a few months away from declaring the New China.
Du Yuesheng, the leader of the Green Gang, saw the writing on the wall and got the hell out, fleeing to Hong Kong. Du, known and named for his Big Ears, got himself and (maybe) his money out, but not his beloved zao bo tou, a funky soup made with the leftovers lees of the Chinese winemaking process and a pig’s worth of offal. So, the legend goes, he sent a clandestine servant back to Shanghai to find and bring him two Shanghainese chefs, solving his soup problem. One was married, one was not. The married one couldn’t be persuaded to choose the gangster over his wife and went back to Shanghai. The single guy stayed in Hong Kong. Big Ears got his soup.
Zhou thought this was bullshit. He had ordered zao bo tou at many restaurants and always found it underwhelming. How could anyone crave this enough to send servants and chefs running thousands of miles across the country? He said as much to Li Borong, when Li was still at De Xing Guan. “Those chefs and I apprenticed with the same master! Sit down,” came the reply. Li went back into the kitchen, made Zhou a large bowl of his own zao bo tou, and in Zhou’s telling, “I ate the entire thing myself. That’s when I knew the story was true.”
I ran this story past Lynn Pan, another Shanghai historian, who knows something about Du. She told me she doesn’t believe it for a second. She cited a number of reasons, first among them that Du was a gaunt opium addict who barely ate, not the type of man to sponsor a Proustian soup quest.
Setting aside the veracity of the tale, the zao bo tou, a soup I’d never heard of and even my Shanghainese assistant, who writes about food herself, had never seen, was delicious, tangy with tender slices of liver, lung and other offal.
Other stories involve the unlikely way that Shanghai has become a time capsule for Fujianese cuisine (there was an influx of Fujianese migrants here in the 19th century), with chefs coming from that province to Shanghai to study the old techniques, and the time Bill Clinton scared the crap out of a restaurant by ruining three pairs of their ivory chopsticks —they only had four — on a particularly sticky piece of la gao, a rice cake scented with flowers.
Sticky la gao. (Photo by Brandon M./SmartShanghai.com)
It’s stories like these that consume Zhou, who says he scrapes by with occasional work for TV stations and magazines, just enough outside fuel to keep his main fire — arcane historical food research — going and provide for his wife and son. In a city with so much interesting and complicated history, Zhou is one of just a handful of food historians untangling the mix of politics, war, migration, regional tastes and economic development that led to the food on Shanghai’s dinner tables.
We ask Zhou for a primer and he launches into a 19th Century Chinese History 101 course. Long story short, the son of a poor farmer from Guangxi, who believed he was the brother of Jesus Christ and fought the government for 14 years to establish the Heavenly Kingdom in China, turned the country upside down, and indirectly forced the entire country’s trade, and all that money, through Shanghai’s 16 Docks. If you were in the north and wanted rice, it no longer came up on the Grand Canal. Now it had to go by sea, and stop-over in Shanghai. If you were in the south and wanted animal hides for leather, the same. This shift in trade from the Grand Canal to the ocean via Shanghai changed the city’s fortunes. The concessions, and their international military presence, provided the stability for that trade to develop, in a time of rebellion and turmoil for much of the rest of the country.
The loading and unloading of the ships required a large pool of labor, and Shanghai began pulling in migrants from around the region, who brought their own cooking traditions. From Ningbo came a salty cuisine based around seafood. From Suzhou and Wuxi came a taste for the combination of soy sauce and sugar. From Subei, the northern half of Jiangsu, came an appreciation for qingdan, light and mild dishes.
Initially, those workers just wanted to xia fan, to literally put down rice, to fill up, Zhou tells me, and they needed dishes with a lot of calories for the hard work, dishes heavy on oil and sugar.
But as time went on, they wanted the food of their hometowns. “Everyone had to get along. You would have people from all of these places working for the same boss, and so the chefs – the company chefs -- had to find a balance that everyone would accept,” Zhou explains. This was the late 19th century, the city’s melting point. Zhou describes it in terms of language. “Shanghai cuisine became a dialect,” he says. Huaiyang cuisine, the refined dishes of the gourmets and salt tycoons of Yangzhou, was the mother tongue.
You bao xia. (Photo by Brandon M./SmartShanghai.com)
The right way to eat you bao xia, according to Zhou, is to count how many guests are at the table and take your entire portion at once, with a spoon (in our case, with four guests, everyone took a quarter) not, god forbid, shrimp-by-shrimp; to hold each shrimp up by its body for inspection, making sure the head is swollen and the tiny tail has opened up like a flower, a sign it’s been fried correctly; to eat the entire shrimp, head, shell, tail and all; and to eat at least three at a time, a number he declares is the minimum amount of shrimp necessary to stimulate one’s taste buds enough to enjoy the dish.
At first, the prescriptive manner is amusing. Here is a man who has eaten enough you bao xia, or thought about enough you bao xia, or cooked enough you bao xia, or all three, to come up with a highly detailed set of instructions for how they must be consumed.
It quickly tires.
The thick tubes of river eels braised in soy sauce and sugar, glossy as a magazine cover, must be rolled onto a spoon using a chopstick, the meat gently separated from the bone by squeezing two chopsticks together along the ribs, and then soft flesh of the eel not chewed, but pushed up against the roof of your mouth with your tongue until it breaks apart, an action so specific I think Zhou made it up, until I learn there’s a word specifically for this action in Chinese. They are fatty and delicious, making the city’s more common eel dish, made with smaller rice eels, also present on our table, seem stingy in comparison.
Braised river eel. (Photo by Brandon M./SmartShanghai.com)
The sea cucumber Zhou orders, looking like the tube sock of the sea, has a good historical bite to it — the city’s chefs realized that by the 1920s, its citizens' wealth was outpacing the richness of their cuisine, and so they chucked a sea cucumber into it — but, covered in a terrible-looking brown sauce, it is perhaps Shanghai’s ugliest dish.
Zhou cuts it open gently and inspects its gelatinous body. A flaw! Imperceptible to us but enough for him to comment on, a quick remark on its soaking success, a key step missed or fucked up, another sign of the decline of civilization. The young waitress holding the dish steps in at exactly the wrong time. “No, it’s always like this,” she offers. It’s more than Zhou can bear. “You’ve never even eaten this dish,” he snaps. “How would you know?” For neophytes like us, far from being sea cucumber experts but willing to be sea cucumber eaters, it is just fine, wobbly and tasting like the innards of the ocean.
Eight treasure duck. Photo by Brandon M./SmartShanghai.com
The rest of the dishes on the table escape a lecturing. There is a cold dish of thin slices of pork belly and a soy sauce flavored with shrimp roe to dip them in, and thick squares of soft tofu braised in stock with crab meat and roe, satisfying even if summer is not the season for Shanghai’s crabs, and an eight-treasure duck, perhaps The Old Restaurant’s most iconic dish, a preparation that takes stuffed poultry to such extremes that the bird becomes little more than a wrapper for a filling of sticky rice, diced chestnuts, shiitake mushrooms and, ostensibly, five other treasures.
Sliced pork belly. (Photo by Brandon M./SmartShanghai.com)
Taken together with the unique zao bo tou and wonderful river eel, a serious challenge to Japan’s eel mastery, Zhou has managed to sidestep the tourist trap side of The Old Restaurant and given us a glimpse of what Li Borong preserved. It’s an interesting if demanding lunch.
Still, things are changing at The Old Restaurant. Li Borong died in 2016 at the age of 84, two years after stepping down from his position, and the kitchens are now run by Luo Yuling, employee number 335, a government certified practitioner of Shanghai’s Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Luo Yuling. (Photo by Brandon M./SmartShanghai.com)
"People don’t want the food to be nong you chi jiang any more,” Luo told us in his office before the meal.
He's referring to the classic description of Shanghainese food as “thick with oil, red with sauce”, the result of a technique usually called red-braising in English, a direct translation of the Chinese hongshao, which in this part of China means a slow braise with soy sauce and sugar, a feature of many of the dishes Zhou ordered for us.
“The younger generation cares more about health and nutrition, so we’ve got to cater to them,” Luo says and gives us an example. Where the kitchen once used just white sugar and a single type of soy sauce for their you bao xia, they now use three types of sugar (white sugar, maltose and honey) and three types of soy sauce (light, dark and a “yellow bean” variety that has recently become popular) – hardly the picture of nutrition, or at least the current Western version of nutrition, where sugar, not fat, is the new enemy. But this is Luo’s world, a relatively young guy invested in the ways of a restaurant generations older than him, and change is incremental.
Another small sign of the change comes towards the end of our lunch. Zhou disappears from the table for five minutes and a bit later reveals to us that our tour through the kitchen, with a photographer, had ruffled some feathers. “’Next time, you need to apply to the relevant people in advance, and not just bring whoever you want into the kitchen’ they told me”, Zhou tells to us, amused though slightly dismayed. “I know all of the managers, all of the cooks in the kitchen. I come here more than some of the employees!”
A few weeks later I check in with Zhou.
His first workshop location has fallen through, and he is sullen. I let a few more weeks pass and this time Zhou is jubilant, talking non-stop. Before we can even get off the street and into his apartment compound, he tells me, “I got it! We’re going to open in August!” An unnamed investor apparently stumped for a year’s rent on a standalone villa on Huating Lu that will become the Zhou Tong Gourmet Workshop, a private project dedicated to documenting the city’s food heritage and experimenting with presentation and new ingredients.
It’s a dream Zhou has been pursuing for decades. “It’s going to be the opposite of the market,” he says. “We are not concerned about money. All we care about is making and recording the best food possible.” He rambles, referencing TV shows he thinks have squandered their opportunity for profit, and comparing himself to a high-tech R&D facility. Finally, he starts spinning stories about all the artists and writers and photographers and dancers that he’s going to invite over for private dinners, who will dine on the food of the master chefs, and won’t pay in money but will pay back in something from their own craft, I think back to our lunch, and wonder about just one thing.
Will he serve shrimp?
