Angelina opened its first Shanghai branch more than 100 years since its establishment in Paris. A lot has changed since 1903. Now, for example, it’s possible to create pastries in Paris, deep-freeze them and fly them over to Shanghai. It’s also perfectly possible to order additional coffee, milk or hot chocolate to be delivered within the hour if you run out. The management at Angelina have apparently grasped one of these concepts, but not the other.

We visited on a Saturday afternoon, anticipating Angelina’s hyped hot chocolate. We ordered a pedestrian drinks selection: coffee, hot chocolate, tea, and milkshake, plus a ubiquitous pastry. This shouldn’t have been difficult for a cafe specialising in coffee, hot chocolate, tea, milkshake and pastry.

Angelina had not only run out of hot chocolate. They had also run out of the necessary ingredients to make lattes and mochas. Iced lattes were possible (implying a lazy pre-mix rather than actual espresso and milk), but they only had one glass left, so we were given plastic cups for all of the other drinks. They’d also run out of chinaware, so the hot water they offered instead of a mocha (decadent) came in a lidless and soulless cardboard take-out cup.

They did manage to serve us a banana milkshake (in a plastic cup more suited to a festival than a fancy French patisserie) and a very neat little cake: L’Africain. Unfortunately, these did not improve our impressions of the place. The cake was still frozen in the middle, and was so hard that we had to saw into it with a blunt pastry knife – less than elegant. The flavour was distinctly okay, and the milkshake was watery and bland.

We ended up paying 339rmb for some flavourless “cocoa” tea, a couple of average iced lattes, two waters at varying temperatures, a banana-less milkshake and a thoroughly disappointing cake. Angelina charge ridiculous prices for lacklustre service, flavourless drinks and all the tiled atmosphere of a metro station platform. There are plenty of better places to get your hot chocolate fix in Shanghai.

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