This month we ring in 2013 with a popular Sunday afternoon standby at Le Royal Meridian, Teutonic and Tex-Mex goodness at Vienna Cafe and Cantina Agave as well as a visit to Ginger's new digs at the park on Xingguo Lu. ***

Ginger

Eclectic café and bakery Ginger has regrouped on Xingguo Lu and has introduced an all-new daily brunch menu. It’s mostly a sampling of simple European flavors with smaller dishes like homemade muesli or toast with “sweet and savory spreads.” Sourdough plays prominently on the menu. You can get it topped with sautéed shiitakes and scrambled eggs or pan-fried rosemary sardines with slow roasted tomatoes, pesto and arugula. You’ll also find sweet treats like ricotta hotcakes topped with fresh fruit, pistachio and honey. As you’d expect, they throw in a few exotic items as well, like the ochatsuke, a Japanese-style dish of rice topped with salmon flakes, wakame seaweed, sesame and genmai cha, Japanese tea that’s roasted with brown rice. Or there is their specialty, shakshouka, a Moroccan-style breakfast of roasted peppers, tomatoes, spinach and eggs sunny-side-up topped with feta crumbles. Prices range anywhere between 30 and 68 kuai. Throw in a side and a coffee and you can plan on spending closer to 120rmb per person. Daily: 11am-5pm For a full brunch listing click here.

Cantina Agave

It’s a relatively small menu — only seven items — but, really, how many possible permutations of eggs and tortillas can a restaurant conjure up? There are, of course, those two Tex-Mex staples huevos rancheros and huevos divorciados. There are two breakfast burrito options, shredded beef machaca or slow-cooked carnitas guisado. Or you can get chilaquiles, chicken and fried tortilla strips topped with cheese and salsa verde. It’s all adequately done, though we could take or leave the salad they seem to throw in alongside everything. Dishes are anywhere between 60 and 85rmb, and if you add 125rmb to that they throw in all the house margaritas that you care to drink. Sat-Sun: 11am-3pm For a full listing click here.

Le Bistrot at Le Royal Méridien

This is one of Shanghai’s longest running and most popular hotel brunches. Every Sunday it’s bustling with an upscale crowd piling plates with high-quality Chinese, Japanese, Cantonese and French food, breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes, roast meat, seafood, desserts, salads, soups… It goes on. Cheeses. Lots of cheeses too. Big wheels of Parmesan that you can almost climb inside. So what? All hotels do the same. The plus here is that it’s busy, which means the turnover is high. Go to a quiet hotel buffet and you’re picking over pieces of desiccated meat that have been sitting under a hot lamp for 90 minutes. Here, the popularity of this brunch means the dishes flow out of the kitchen fresh and regular. And they’re not stingy with the champagne. There’s a DJ, who plays commercial stuff, 80s music, a bit of house, all perhaps a bit too loud, so you’re shouting over your sushi, but some of the other entertainment works better: leggy girls wearing pink nurses uniforms who squirt sugary cocktails around with plastic syringes. It's all good fun but the food is excellent quality, and that's the real draw. Brunch is 488rmb+15% including free-flow Mumm Brut champers. Add 100rmb and they'll pour you Mumm Rosé. Sun: 12-3pm For a full brunch listing click here.

Vienna Cafe

Vienna Cafe does an Austrian-style buffet every Sunday. It’s a far cry from the Sunday afternoon decadence of Le Bistrot, but it scores loads of points with its homey charm. At 145rmb per person including one coffee, hot chocolate or tea it’s not particularly cheap, but there’s free-flow of orange and apple juice. On offer is a selection of healthy-ish German breakfast items — homemade muesli and yogurt, herbal dip, hummus with pita bread, assorted cheese and ham, Greek salad, fruit, all kinds of German breads and they throw in eggs-any-style as well. There is even our personal favorite the “Kaiserschmarrn” — an Austrian pancake dish served with applesauce. Though this is really just a taster, considering it’s only about a fifth of a normal portion. Brunch goes from 10:30am to 2pm. The place only has about eight tables, so reservations are highly recommended. During the week, they also do breakfast a la carte. Sun: 10.30am-2pm For a full brunch listing click here. *** For a full list of all the brunches in Shanghai, go here.