HAIRY CRAB SPECIAL 1/4 - SHANGHAI: Cejerdary 蟹家大院

What time is it? What time is it?
IT'S DAZHAXIE TIME !

So it's the time of the year again where the Chinese, the Hongkies and some Singaporeans ( me !) go crazy about hairy crabs.

Just a little about this crabs that I'm absolutely crazy about - DaZhaXie, also known as shanghai mitten crabs, also known as hairy crabs, is a medium size burrowing crab that is known for it's furry claws. This crab is an autumn delicacy in Shanghai and eastern China. It's prized for the female crab roe, which ripen in the 0th lunar month and males in the 10th.
Chinese spend hundreds of yuan just to taste a small crab from Yangcheng lake.

Over the next few days, I will be blogging about other places I've been to where you can enjoy wonderful, authentic hairy crabs.

Cejerdary is an upmarket noodle house specializing in hairy crab noodles. It's a very small place with only 18 seats. Good to make reservations I heard !
I made my reservation 2 weeks before I flew over to Shanghai, I was told that if I was more than 5 minutes late, they would give up my seat :o

What's really impressive is that this restaurant has an inhouse team of crab pickers, who shell up to 12 hairy crabs from Yangcheng Lake for each of the most expensive 360yuan bowl.

There's only 3 options here, but actually there's 4 items  

The ones on the board are 1) Xie Da Ji (36yuan) - i have no idea what it is maybe regular bowl with regular hairy crab meat? The chinese words doesn't even make sense :/

2) Xie Rou Rou ( 72 yuan) - hairy Crab Meat 

3) Xie Huang Jin ( 360yuan) - hairy crab ROE

Each option comes with free peanuts and ginger water. 

The one that's not on the board, but they asked if i wanted is

DRUNKEN CRAB (well I guess it's not really a meal but rather a side dish, maybe thats why it's not on the baord) 

I've seen how they do it because Nick's dad's friend business associate wanted to give me a whole bottle of it last year when I was in Shanghai for a month. But I'm really not a fan of eating raw crabs that are drowned alive in alcohol. 

Because I always order the best and the most expensive...

TADA!

Xie Huang Jin ( look the edible gold flakes! I feel like my social status just upped a notch ! ) 

SO SO SO GOOD. 

I definitely recommend anybody, if you were to visit this restaurant, to just bite the bullet and order the crab roe noodles. Enjoy first, worry about your cholesterol later :p 

Cejerdary
1266 Kaixuan road 
 Open daily, 11am-8.30pm
call for reservations : +8652300008

SHANGHAI: 上海1号私藏菜瑞金南路店 Shanghai No. 1 Restaurant

There's this restaurant about 5 minutes walk from my apartment in Shanghai and about 20 minutes walk from my hospital which I really like. They serve really good Shanghai-nese food. I actually came here twice. Once brought by my local friend, and the other time brought by my Shanghai boss. Okay la, both also considered local friends haha. 

Proof that I actually do some work haha.

My Shanghai friend tells me that Shanghainese people have a sweet tooth. And they tend to use more sugar in their cooking. He says that this is a must order dish at every Shanghai restaurant -- Lotus stuffed with glutineous rice.

I have a sweet tooth but this is unfortunately not my kind of dish. Partially because my digestive system is really bad ( runs in the family), I get severe indigestion whenever I eat too much glutineous rice. 

duck. 

EEL ! Yum

Some forest vegetable. Wah, lucky eat already never die. 

Shanghai Style Braised Pork Belly (Hong Shao Rou) or red cooked pork.

This pork was so heavenly I didn't mind getting my arteries clogged up. Of course I tried to minimise the clogging by drinking heaps of chinese tea. My momma says that chinese tea will wash away the oil lol #oldwivestale

Deep fried squirrel fish. This has been my favourite since I was a child! My grandma always makes this on special occasions.

上海1号私藏菜瑞金南路店 (Shanghai No 1 Restaurant, Ruijin south road branch)
瑞金南路1号海兴广场3层
reservations: 电话： 021-64189777 
                          :  021-64185757

SHANGHAI: Fu He Hui 1 Michelin Star

I've been to Shanghai 3 times in the last one year now. While I may not have been able to eat my way across the city but I think I can definitely say with lots of pride that I've tried my best in hunting down all the ones that I feel are unique and worth parting the money for. 

I remember when I first went to Shanghai a decade back, everything was so cheap, I was literally spending my money without thinking. But in the last few years, Shanghai has definitely had some really good restaurants sprouting up that are almost the same price as fine dining restaurants in Australia or even more. 

I admit I'm a brand whore, I'm a Michelin chaser. How excited was I when Shanghai was included in the Michelin guide last year ! One restaurant which really caught my attention was Fu He Hui.

I'm a meat eater. I tried going vegetarian last year once just for the fun of it, and I suffered tremendously. After one week, I walked past the beef section in the supermarket and I hallucinated. I saw the beef calling out my name asking me to take it home and cook it. So I bought 2 grain fed angus scotch fillet and cooked them medium rare, YUM. 

End of my vegetarian journey. 

1* Michelin for 2 years running and one of the 2 restaurants to make it to world's 50 best this year, I definitely definitely recommend this restaurant. I can't imagine any carnivore hating on this, it makes clean, healthy eating tasty. 

And I love their interior. It's outfitted in a neutral palette of earth and grey tones with lots of stone, wood and fabrics. It was so zen, I felt so calm and at peace and even more so since they gave me a private room all to myself. If not for the service staff  ( by the way, the service staff were also v zen looking, seems likes it's predominantly male and they mostly all have shaven heads... Is that a pre-requisite to employment? ) bringing my set menu items and disrupting the serenity and tranquility, I could have meditated until I achieved immortality. okay just kidding.

They serve 3 set menus - 380, 680, 880yuan.

ALWAYS ALWAYS GO FOR THE MOST EXPENSIVE. 

oh I also had some really expensive tea ( da hong pao) , It was like almost 100yuan :/

MY FAVOURITE DISH. 

Please do yourself a favour and eat at this restaurant at least once when you're in Shanghai. If I could have such wonderful vegetarian meals everyday, I wouldn't mind being a monk. 

1037 Yuyuan Road, Changning District, Shanghai

For bookings: +8639809188 ( they speak limited english)

SHANGHAI: Nanxiang Xiao Long Bao (steamed dumplings) 南翔小笼包

So I've previously blogged about Nanxiang Xiao Long Bao at Cheng huang miao
If you've ever been there, you would know that the human traffic is terrible! It's like.. where do all these people come from? You worry about getting pick-pocketed, you worry about catching a bug of people, but worse, you worry about people spitting everywhere and accidentally getting some spit on you!

I love xiaolongbaos, in fact I love them so much that every time I come back to Adelaide from a holiday, my friends always say I look more like a xiaolongbao. ( a nice way to say I've become more well nourished). But, I had excessive crowd and I hate queueing.
So.. I managed to find a Nanxiang XLB branch which hardly has any queue at all, and flavour wise I feel is comparable or may be even better than the one at cheng huang miao!

It's located in Shanghai First food hall on Nan Jing East Road on the third level.

As I said, always go for the most expensive crab roe + pork filling dumpling.
48yuan for 8.
Yummiest.

And always order a serve of their fried pork cutlet (12yuan)

Nanxiang xiaolongbao 南翔小笼包

Shanghai First Food Hall

720 Nanjing East Road

SHANGHAI: Nanxiang XiaoLongBao (steamed dumplings) at Cheng Huang Miao 南翔小笼包 城隍庙

 Okay, so everybody who has known me for awhile would know there are 2 countries I absolutely love to go for holiday, apart from of course my home country Singapore... they are.. JAPAN! and, not really a country but more of a place... SHANGHAI!

So I first visited Shanghai when I was 14, then went for an exchange program there at 15 ( lollol, Had my puppylove experience then heheheh), and when I had a chance to go over to do a rotation in surgery at RuiJin Hospital, I GRABBED IT.

Nong hou!

So.. One of the must go places if you were to go an online google search for ' top things to do in Shanghai' will be to visit Cheng Huang Temple. It's heaps touristy, it's crowded everyday, my local friends tell me that no local Shanghai-nese will ever visit the place. In fact, my boss at RuiJin hospital told me she has never been to Cheng Huang Temple despite born and bred in Shanghai.. HMMMMM.
But I love touristy things so yup.

BING TANG HU LU! So as far as I remember, everytime there's a TV drama about ancient China, there would be a fat kid eating this. Nothing fancy, it's just a traditional chinese snack of candied hawthorn. Recently stores are starting to sell candied strawberries instead of hawthorn but yeah that's just weird. 

I was there nearing the Chinese New Year period, hence the festivity.

So... obviously after wrestling thru the sea of people, you get hungry. What should you eat? My recommendation is definitely the one that is on the michelin bib gourmand list...........NANXIANG STEAMED DUMPLINGS/XLB. (See first pic)

This place has 3 levels. The first level has the longest queues. Because it's the cheapest. However, I really discourage you from buying the first level xiaolongbaos. I mean we've seen many videos of fake eggs, newspaper pork fillings... I don't know... I'm not insinuating anything.. but as my asian mom likes to say in cantonese - yat fun qin yat fun for ( you pay for what you get ).. And a local actually told me that those unsold steamed buns from the third level gets shipped down to the second level the next day, they remove the meat from the skin and re-wrap them and it gets sold, if they are unsold, there are shipped down to the first level and the same recurs. So....... hurhurhur, the bottom of the chain is always gonna be the most unfresh. It's like real life isn't it, the bottom of the food chain is always the shit-est. 

Anyway, I always opt to go to the highest level. There's a minimum spend of 80yuan per person. Which is actually not expensive at all.. Oh by the way, the price of xiao long bao increases as you go up the level..  So it's extremely easy to hit the minumum spend.

My soup dumpling! It's this thick dumpling skin that contains crab roe and pork juice. 

Expensive and a waste of money. Moreover, the soup is so hot, I burnt my tongue. 

Always always always opt for the crab roe + pork dumpling. 

It's the best. 

Oh, if the queue here scares you, another place to enjoy these xiao long baos will be at Nanjing South Road. It's actually also the branch I frequent more often just because it's conveniently located ( I love the bund, and I love shopping). You may check my post out here nanxiang xiao long bao nanjinglu

Nanxiang Xiaolongbao 南翔小笼包 城隍庙
cheng huang temple
huangpu district, shanghai