In Shanghai, there is no easy equivalent for the American breakfast diner, a fact often bemoaned by my expat friends and me. We tend to wear our artery clogging days of yore as a proud badge, our messy, gratifying right to remain uncomfortably full for the remainder of the day. However, I’m happy to report that Shanghainese breakfast is in fact alive and well, and has more in common with its defiantly greasy American counterparts than one might think.

Shanghai’s breakfast scene isn’t overflowing with fresh, delicately seasoned items. Once celebrated food streets like Wujiang Lu and Xiangyang Lu have undergone a peculiar sort of gentrification. The former has gone from a charmingly offbeat block of cheap eats and knockoff regional specialties to a knockoff of Universal City Walk, all gleaming facades and mechanized food processes. Still, there are a few Shanghainese breakfast staples that have resisted the newly established pecking order. If you know where to look, you can come mighty close to recreating the hearty, bon-vivant-friendly atmosphere of the best street food scenes in Asia.

The potstickers at Wujiang Lu’s Yi Ping – which roughly translates to “First Rate” – won’t bowl you over with their presentation (or, for that matter, with their second-rate meat filling), but Yi Ping is a local institution that deserves the brisk business it commands. Foremost among its charms is the delightfully oversized, piping hot wok used to prepare the potstickers. No less crucial is the deliciously charred golden-brown texture Yi Ping’s they seem to achieve every time out. Sprinkle some extra handfuls of sesame seeds and green onion on top, courtesy of the chef’s personal stash, then do what we all do best: Dunk in vinegar. Crush. Repeat.

Wujiang Lu may be a shell of its former self (by year’s end, Yi Ping will have found a new home, making it yet another nondescript food stall on another nondescript street) but the fashion in which Xiangyang Lu has fallen out of, uh, fashion is even more startling. The Xiangyang market was once the city’s towering achievement in Old World merchandising: a giant goods bazaar that was your one-stop shop for the weekend blitzkrieg. Now, solitary watch/bag/DVD hawkers roam the streets restlessly, knowing that tourism traffic has been permanently redirected elsewhere. Fortunately, the breakfast stall remains a vivrant thing on this street, with teeming masses lining up from the crack of dawn until 10:00 a.m., when vendors start trotting out their lunch menus to satiate the generally pliable business set.

Steamed buns – “baozi” in Chinese – aren’t exactly a rarity in Shanghai, but they’re seldom as fresh – and fresh-off-the-steamers – as they are on Xiangyang Lu, particularly the ones with vegetable filling. Gobs of green, stringy vermicelli, and mushrooms (and, if you’re lucky, diced cubes of dried tofu) leave you gasping for air, but the doughy, elastic texture of the bun itself ensures that you chew carefully.

The rest of the stalls on Xiangyang Lu are heavy on the savory pancake. Savory crepes are one thing, but Northern style Chinese pancakes, for my yuan, are perhaps the best bread-y treat outside of naan. The Shanghainese take tends to play up the sauce and oil while downplaying the workmanship, but on Xiangyang Lu there’s enough subtle innovation to keep the palate moist. In one stall it’s a carefully applied double layering of bread-y goodness, with sesame on top and green onion underneath, adding more bark to the bite. In another it’s egg and leek flattened out in the middle, with chili oil and a pseudo-teriyaki sauce gently dabbed over the top layer, lending the effect of a more rustic, less cluttered omelette. Oh, those achy-breaky arteries!

I hope I’ve succeeded in illustrating that pancake perfection, while elusive in Shanghai, is at least a compelling enough aspiration. Don’t think for a minute, though, that the Holy Grail doesn’t exist. One of the true delights of living in Shanghai is discovering the undiscovered gem and championing it to those who take as much pride in the discovery as I do. Disregard for a moment that discovery eventually leads to overexposure (not to mention overconsumption), and you’ll remember that the journey, more so than the destination, makes it all worthwhile.

The journey of the city’s best green onion pancake, or “cong you bing” – goes thusly: A Da, the humpbacked old man who is a fixture of Nanchang Road, keeps one vigilant eye on his makeshift coal oven and the other on his rapidly accumulating piles of dough; he pounds the dough, then kneads it, then lines up the pancakes one by one, flipping and sprinkling green onion, sprinkling green onion and flipping them. This is a master chef, sous-chef, waiter, cashier, artistan and pancake proprietor rolled into one. He is the real reason to savor these pancakes, bite by handmade bite.

There will be no Michelin stars, no Hollywood motion pictures commemorating A Da. He does what he does because he’s damned great at it, and because for him, the craft and the payoff are one and the same: a furious flurry of dough that I suspect can’t stop, won’t stop until someone has to pry it out of his fingers. You can have your free coffee refills; I’ll take the perfect cong you bing every. Single. Time.

Share this story. Stay hungry.

• 

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 1:26 am and is filed under Shanghai.