A Short History of Gluttony In Shanghai
by Bill Savadove
Gluttony has a weighty presence in the history of Shanghai, where East met West as Chinese merchants and foreign settlers brought their home cooking to the city after the late 1800s, when the port opened wider to the outside world.
In 1929, the Sunday breakfast menu at the luxury Palace Hotel offered fruit salad and stewed prunes to start; four kinds of cereal; boiled, fried, scrambled and poached eggs; three kinds of omelets; potatoes cooked three ways; five proteins including fried fish, ham, bacon, minced beef, and a breakfast lamb chop; ending with French brioche pastry spread with honey or orange marmalade. Beverages were tea, coffee, or cocoa.
The Sunday hotel brunch buffet remains a fixture of the dining scene in Shanghai, except now you can imbibe free-flowing Champagne. In 1929, it was considered off the menu and charged a la carte.
Before Michelin brought its starred restaurant guides to Shanghai, the 1936 guidebook “Shanghai: High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights” gave this advice: Cantonese restaurant Sun Ya was “probably the best spot to get a Chinese dinner” while Jimmy’s restaurant was “where most foreigners eat and meet”.
Opened in 1926, Sun Ya proved hugely popular with foreign diners and Chinese alike. Famous dishes included a steamed melon “cup” stuffed with meat, as well as skewers of roast meat in the shape of ancient Chinese coins, which had a hole in the middle.
The menu even offered Chop Suey — the staple of Chinese-American restaurants. “Our recipe calls for shredded chicken, duck, pork, mushrooms, bamboo shoots and bean sprouts,” its menu said.
Jimmy’s was the forerunner of the fast food giants operating in China today with a menu that included hamburger sandwiches, french-fried potatoes and fried spring chicken. The owner, a former American sailor named Jimmy James, opened the “Broadway Lunch” in 1924, before changing the name a year later and opening more branches.
Fine dining has now returned to Shanghai’s waterfront Bund — the row of buildings along the Huangpu river which composes the city’s architectural signature — with a slew of restaurants offering expansive views and expensive prices, but they are not the pioneers.
On May 30, 1939, members of the exclusive Shanghai Club on the Bund sat down to “tiffin” — meaning lunch, an Anglo-Indian term popularized by foreigners living in the cosmopolitan city. Originally opened in 1865, the club was famous for its “Long Bar” where seating followed a prescribed hierarchy based on corporate seniority.
The Shanghai Club menu that day featured tomato soup, followed by fried fish with cucumber, chicken and bacon accompanied by potatoes and peas, a dessert of strawberries, rounded out with cheese, fruit, and coffee.
Shanghai had a rich coffee culture in the past, though without the bewildering array of caffeinated beverages of today. Jimmy’s restaurant advertised a “cup o’ java that can’t be beat” while another famous establishment, the Chocolate Shop, offered iced coffee topped with whipped cream.
The optimistically-named phrasebook “Shanghai Dialect in 4 Weeks” included a dialog of how to order a cup of coffee in the local language, but it used a racist term for a Chinese male servant which was common when it was published in 1940:
“Boy, give me a cup of coffee (ka-fee).”
“Yes sir, with milk?”
“No, I want it plain.”
A good meal wouldn’t be complete without dessert. Before the chain ice cream parlors decorating the Shanghai landscape of today, the Chocolate Shop served up 31 flavors of ice cream sundaes, ranging from Butter Scotch to Caramel Walnut.
J. G. Ballard — the British author of the novel “Empire of the Sun” based on his Shanghai childhood — fondly recalled “Saturday ice cream sundaes at the Chocolate Shop”.
Bill Savadove
Bill Savadove’s interest in the restaurants of old Shanghai grew from his Shanghainese grandfather’s reminisces about the Sun Ya restaurant during the 1940s. Bill worked as a journalist in Asia for two decades. He was formerly the Shanghai Bureau Chief for the European news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and was also previously Shanghai Bureau Chief for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper and Chief Economic Correspondent for China for the Reuters news agency.
He is co-author of a walking guide to historical architecture in Shanghai, “Shanghailanders & Shanghainese: Where They Lived, Worked & Played”. He shared a local Hong Kong press award for his coverage of China’s Sichuan earthquake in 2008, as well as a 2012 prize for excellence in environmental reporting awarded by a Singapore NGO.