HIPPER than Hong Kong and more alluring than Beijing, Shanghai has always had a heady mystique. Situated on China's east coast, surrounded by the fertile Yangtze River delta, the city was home to the best eating in the country long before its recent fast-forward leap to modernity and a generation of new-wave restaurants.
Here in the San Gabriel Valley, as the Chinese immigrant population has grown and become more diverse, chefs and restaurateurs from the Shanghai area have begun to showcase the food of their region. Today a Shanghainese expat can quash nostalgia by digging into a steamer full of juicy dumplings at Mei Long Village in San Gabriel or by gathering with family and friends around a hotpot of crab roe-stuffed meatball soup at Shanghai Bamboo House in Temple City.
We've got fancy Shanghai-style dining rooms ready to lay out a traditional banquet, modest family restaurants and lowbrow dives. True, the globally inspired creations now cropping up in the mother city's contemporary and avant-garde restaurants are absent.
Classic comfort foods like red-cooked pork and drunken chicken rule in Southern California. But as Shanghai once again gains recognition as a food mecca, our local Shanghainese restaurants are growing in number and quality.
After several visits to any of these restaurants you begin to see the surprising breadth and variety of Shanghai's cooking, how it differs from the more familiar Cantonese style and why, with its many outside influences, it is the most representative of China's food as a whole.
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Refined ingredients
SHANGHAI'S cuisine is an inheritance, gathered over many centuries from the surrounding Yangtze cities that have been at various times seats of government, strongholds of commerce and havens for aristocrats from the north as well as a wealthy mercantile class. For centuries, these cities were centers of culinary innovation. Suzhou, for example, built a reputation for exquisitely made pastries that were the forerunners of modern Shanghai-style dim sum.
In Hangzhou, the elite members of society during the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) dined at restaurants whose menus offered hundreds of beautifully crafted, often intricate dishes that some speculate has led to Shanghai's tradition of offering many appetizers.
