Born and bred Shanghai girl, I'm exceedingly proud of anything and everything Shanghainese. Including cuisine. China is a diverse land, with each geographical area having their own distinct style of cooking. They say Chinese food can be roughly divided into eight main styles, but the truth is, there are many many sub-divisions within these eight broad categories. The South-East coastal region of China where Shanghai is located is known for its delicate cooking style (just compare Southern and Northern dim sims and you'll find that Southern style dim sim is dainty whereas Northern style dim sim is hearty) , liberal use of sauces and quite sweet palate. By sweet I mean, even when we cook savoury dishes we like to throw in some sugar to give the dishes a more complex flavour.
What most people think of when Shanghainese cuisine is mentioned would be dim sims - pork buns and the like. While these are certainly representative of Shanghainese food, what I'm going to review today are more substantial, proper fare.
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| Prawns and rice crackers in tomato sauce |
The dish is served with the sauce on the side. You pour the sauce onto the rice crackers so that you get a crackling noise. This dish has that typical savoury-but-sweet taste of Shanghainese cuisine. The sauce is tomato based, thickened with corn starch, with prawns, tomato pieces and peas.
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| Wagyu beef with black pepper sauce |
Passing the more-famous Shanghai style pork belly, we pick this delicious wagyu beef dish. Succulent, soft and perfectly-cooked diced wagyu beef and button mushroom are lightly tossed in a soysauce-based black pepper sauce. The flavour of the sauce does not overwhelm that distinct taste of wagyu beef, but rather enhances it. Recommend.
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| Fresh vegetables with salty and preserved eggs |
This dish is the only one which disappointed. Seasonal vegetable is poached in a light broth, seasoned with salty, preserved duck eggs and the infamous 'century eggs'. The dish has the potential to be delicious - I have had similar dishes elsewhere and the salty, distinct tastes of the eggs brings out the freshness of the vegetables; making the broth flavoursome; but in this particular case it simply wasn't well executed.
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| Peking Duck (Part 1) |
OK, OK, technically this isn't Shanghainese cuisine - but it's such a staple in Chinese cuisine that many old, well-known restaurants in Shanghai specialise in this dish. Peking duck is always served in two courses. The first course is a crispy duck-skin pancake, served with cucumber, a thick, sweet sauce and spring onion.
The spring onion is a distinctly Northern touch, so my family generally forgoes it because we don't like the aftertaste - in my opinion, a duck pancake without the spring onion tastes just as good, if not fresher. The combination of the duck skin, cucumber and sauce gives the dish complex flavour as well as complex texture, characterised by a well-balanced combination of sweet, salty, crunchy, soft and crispy.
The Peking duck at Shanghai Stories 1938 is alright. When it comes to Peking duck, the devil is in the detail. If I were to nit-pick and compare this version to those served at, say, Da Dong in Beijing or some of the old, well-known establishments in Shanghai (which is admittedly an unfair comparison given the price difference etc), I would say that first, the pancake could be warmer, softer and thinner - they need to be thin as gossamer to be excellent; second, the way the duck skin is cut included too much meat - in the good establishments in China, they have special chefs to perform the skinning of the cooked duck by the table, and they really only take the skin off so that the skin is paper-thin; and lastly there could be just a little less oil. Having said that, I would still recommend the Peking duck at Shanghai Stories, it is quite good.
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| Peking Duck (Part 2) |
While the first part of Peking duck is always the duck-skin pancake, you generally get a choice of how you want the rest of the duck - the meat - served. My family's choice is diced duck meat in lettuce cups. This dish involves cooking diced duck meat with some bamboo and bean sprout, and the resulting dish is fresh, delicious, and a little messy to eat! I particularly like the Shanghai Stories version of this dish, because they are not overly liberal with spring onions or shallots (my food enemies, along with raw Spanish onion).
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| Fried Sticky Rice |
I have saved the best for last. This fried rice is no ordinary fried rice. It's fried sticky rice. The best part about this dish is the fact that soft sticky rice is served with crunchy, pan-fried sticky rice, which gives a very interesting texture to the dish. This is truly a seemingly-simple, but interesting and delicious winner.
Score: 3.5 / 5
I am perhaps somewhat biased - having a mother who cooks very well and growing up in Shanghai, I'm quite difficult to impress where Chinese food is concerned. Also I actually don't like Chinese food that much - so take my 3.5 with a grain of salt; Shanghai Stories 1938 is actually one of my top picks for Chinese food in Sydney.
Cost: All dishes listed range between $25 - $45. With this restaurant (and you will find the same with most other larger, more authentic Chinese restaurants), you could have a pretty simple and relatively inexpensive meal (particularly during yum cha hour); but you could also order lobsters,abalone and crabs for a banquet which will take the bill right above the $1000 mark.
Address: The Concourse, Chatswood
Website: http://www.tosau.com.au/about-us/shanghai-stories/
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