GRAEME KENNEDY
ASIA PAC
CITY FOCUS
"The city’s regionally and nationally diversified restaurant industry defined the city’s culinary landscape and became part of the very idea of Shanghai"
concessions by the British, French and Americans, each who brought their own food traditions to the city. During this colonial period, the influx of foreigners combined with domestic migration from elsewhere in the country made Shanghai China’s most demographically diverse city. New residents set up small
us when we got to China, but actually even the connection to the rest of the world was going on way before.”
International port Situated where the Yangtze River meets the sea in China’s eastern Jiangnan region, Shanghai (literally meaning “city on the sea”) was already a major metropolitan area with a significant cotton industry by the time Europeans arrived. Foodstuffs, both staple and luxury, from regions such as Southeast Asia and the New World had found their way to China by the 16th century and imported goods
began gaining a significant foothold by the 18th century, Waley-Cohen writes in her chapter in Living the Good Life, a book exploring how goods furthered the expansion of social networks, alliance- building between rulers and regional elites, featuring contributions from a number of scholars of Chinese history. Still, there’s no denying that 1843 had a major and almost instantaneous impact. This was the year when Shanghai was declared an international treaty port after the end of the First Opium War and divided into independently administered
restaurants offering food from their hometowns, and by the 1930s local guidebooks described the wealth of regional Chinese cuisines ranging from Cantonese to Sichuanese to Yunnanese and everything in between, writes Mark Swislocki in his book on Shanghai’s food history, Culinary Nostalgia. “The city’s regionally and nationally diversified restaurant industry defined the city’s culinary landscape and became part of the very idea of Shanghai,” he continues. It’s an idea that remains at the essence of the city today – a melting pot of cultures and a microcosm of the country.
In addition to the vast compendium of regional Chinese cuisines, this period also saw the introduction of and growing fascination with Western food unlike anywhere else in China. Europeans and Americans taught their local household help approximations of their native dishes and established restaurants serving Western fare, which over time began to attract Chinese clientele as well. In turn, Chinese restaurateurs opened their own Western-style eateries called fancaiguan. A whole trend of Chinese adaptations
of European dishes called dacai (“big plate”) began, originating in the late 19th century and peaking in the 1920s and 30s. Borscht with tomatoes and cabbage instead of beets, baked noodles and cheese with Chinese noodles instead of pasta were a few of the popular dacai dishes.
Fusion from turbulence
After a turbulent few decades of Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution, Shanghai’s restaurant industry re-emerged in the opening and reform period of the 1980s. A style of cooking called haipai (Shanghai style) arose during these years. Previously used at the start of the 20th century to describe the city’s east-meets-west culture and foreign-influenced theater, art and literature, the term haipai refers to the unique mix of Shanghai’s benbangcai (literally ‘local cuisine’) cooking with other traditions, whether from other far-flung regions in China or abroad. This fusion approach was
fueled by semi-communal living arrangements with multi-family homes. “Your neighbors were part of your life,” Shanghai-born chef Jacqueline Qiu reminiscences about growing up in a traditional lane house forty years ago. On birthdays, the whole house would get the Shanghainese style noodles her parents cooked alongside Ningbo-style pickles from her neighbors’ hometown. “This is haipai,” she says. “Everything together on the menu.” All of this lay the
groundwork for Shanghai’s 83
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