Shanghainese, If You Please

“Pork with preserved vegetables” sounds boring. But Jay Francis kept
tapping on this item on the menu at Shanghai Cuisine and
insisting that I try it. A friend of his from China had recommended the
restaurant and the dish, so we ordered it. We also ordered something
called “bean seedlings” and some “mustard greens with snow
soybeans.”

The generic-sounding pork turned out to be a big, luscious square of
pork belly, slow-roasted until the fat melted in your mouth. The meat
was cut into neat bite-sized square wafers and topped with a brown
sauce seasoned with pungent pickled mustard greens. It was one of the
best pork belly dishes I’ve had in Houston.

The bean seedlings turned out to be lightly cooked snow pea shoots
in garlic, one of my favorite Asian vegetables. “Snow soybeans” were
actually edamame in a wild vegetable stew with chopped mustard
greens and a delightful garlic sauce.

The deep-fried Shanghai spring rolls were skinny, greasy and boring.
The stir-fry celery with lily and pine nuts turned out to be a
nine-dollar plate of celery slices. And the cold tofu in Shanghai sauce
came with lots of gelatinous thousand-year-old eggs that the tofu-lover
at the table couldn’t choke down. You win some, you lose some,
right?

I took a lot of leftovers home, and I discovered that snow pea
shoots in garlic sauce taste wonderful cold. So do mustard greens and
edamame. But cold pork belly eaten cold tastes like raw bacon. You
can’t heat it in the microwave either — the fat gets all
rubbery.

On my second visit to Shanghai Cuisine, I played it safe and stuck
with noodle dishes. Stir-fried noodles with chicken was the best of the
lot. The noodles were stained brown by the soy sauce and held plenty of
chicken and vegetables in a pleasantly oily nest. The beef noodle soup
featured chewy fresh noodles and a deep brown broth — it was
excellent. But the pork rib noodle soup had four watery pork ribs, a
pile of noodles and a broth that looked and tasted like dishwater.

I stopped by another time to try one of the incredibly cheap lunch
specials — everything is $4.88. When I observed to our
waitress, Stella, that Shanghai’s cuisine wasn’t spicy, she took it as
a challenge.

“Shanghainese like spicy dishes too,” she said. Shanghainese is what
people from Shanghai call themselves, she said — the most famous
Shanghainese celebrity in Houston is Yao Ming.

So I asked Stella to pick a spicy item for me. She chose the first
item on the menu, “Spicy Fish Fillet (sic).”

The dish that came to the table had a few tilapia medallions covered
with dried red peppers and slices of fresh jalapeño. There were
literally more red and green peppers than white fish. The bottom of the
plate was covered with bright orange oil. I wondered if they had cooked
the fish and pepper in chile oil, just to make sure it was spicy
enough.

I took another look at Shanghai Cuisine’s menu and shook my head in
wonder. “888” is a lucky number in Chinese numerology, and there are
some 30 items on the menu priced at $8.88 — everything from
seafood hot pot to sliced celery is the same price. Most of the rest
are $4.88.

The food can be remarkable, or it can be boring. But the
translations are so horrible, you just can’t predict what you’re going
to get.
_____________________

On my last visit to Shanghai Cuisine, I met Jay Francis and his
friend Roy Wang for lunch. Roy read the Chinese menu and translated for
us. He cleared up several mysteries. The ingredient listed as “gluten”
on the menu was actually several different noodle-like substances.

The one called “House special gluten” looked like a brown cellulose
sponge cut into squares and topped with day lily buds, black fungus and
a slightly sweet soy-based sauce. I loved the funky texture of that
one.

Gluten with mustard greens looked like thick white slices from an
egg-shaped noodle ball tossed with chopped greens in vinaigrette. It
tasted like a rubbery rice noodle disk salad. The “gluten with black
mushrooms in hot pot” was a mushroom soup with yellow blobs of starch
that looked like limp slugs floating around in it. They weren’t easy to
grab with the shiny lacquered chopsticks, but when you got hold of one,
it tasted like a slimy mass of starch.

Roy also ordered us a plate of Shanghai shrimp — a plate of
delicate, barely cooked white shrimp with edamame beans in a light
cornstarch-thickened shrimp sauce. Jay got a plate of spicy fried
chicken that was loaded with dried chiles and sprinkled with little
red-skinned peanuts. He impressed us all by eating some of the chicken
pieces Chinese-style, bones and all.

When I thanked Roy for the translations and asked for the spelling
of his name, he said, “Everybody calls me Roy, but my real Chinese name
is Pei. My wife’s name is Wei. One time, we got our photo taken
standing in front of a Pei Wei Diner. We sent the picture back home and
told all our friends we bought a restaurant.”

“How did you like Pei Wei’s food?” I asked.

“I’ve never tried it,” he said. Roy told me that as far as he knew,
Shanghai Cuisine was the first Shanghai-style restaurant in Houston.
But it’s no longer the only one — another Shanghai-style Chinese
restaurant recently opened right across the street.

This kind of cooking became a favorite late in his life, he said.
“When I was younger, I loved spicy Chinese food,” Roy told me. “But my
stomach can’t take it anymore.” It’s easy to skip the spicy stuff in a
Shanghai Chinese restaurant. And thanks to the fermented vegetables,
the heavy garlic, and lots of mushrooms and flower buds, the food still
manages to be bold-flavored without the fiery chile peppers.

Now that Roy has helped me figure out the menu, I can’t wait to go
back and try some of the salt-and-pepper seafood dishes and the weird
oversize broad beans. I’ll also be ordering some more of that awesome
pork belly. And this time, there won’t be any leftovers.