Even those who are lifetime connoisseurs of fine dining will cop to a few dingier delights. After all, life can’t always be fois gras and duck confit, right? Sometimes it’s Hot Pockets and frozen dumplings and whatever else keeps your cupboards stocked (Mother’s Circus Animal Cookies, R.I.P.) and your bellies nourished.

In Chinese cuisine, for every family-style feast that keeps the Lazy Susan humming at terminal velocity there’s a cheaper, greasier, slow-as-molasses-paced alternative. I’d be willing to bet my bottom dollar that in any city with a surplus of Chinese dining options available – Shanghai included – the Hong Kong café, or “cha chan ting,” gets the nod of convenience every single time. It’s music for the spoonfed masses, and like the best Cantonese pop tunes, it leaves plenty of room for a saccharine hook (read: dessert).

Shanghai’s recent cha chan ting transplant – the aptly named “Cha” – piles on the usual Hong Kong trademarks: speedy, spotty service, massive helpings of calories (along with massive potential for clogged arteries), baked pasta and rice dishes, barbecued and boiled meats with honey-dipped or salt-glazed condiments, milk teas with the condensed milk all but liquefied (and don’t you dare ask for boba), congees that are to traditional rice porridges as pop giant Jacky Cheung is to the rest of his wispy, albeit well-manicured, Cantopop peers. There’s eating in excess, and then there’s the cha chan ting, where every taste bud is on overdrive, every dish contains more brazenness of flavor than the last. Oh, and be prepared for some kind of wait, because once you sit down, there’s no getting up for awhile.

After a weekend of eating out with some of my more capricious dining companions, there was little doubt that I needed a meal like Cha’s to decompress. I figured that an ice-cold glass of half milk-tea, half coffee (the Hong Kong equivalent of an Arnold Palmer) would do the trick, but ordered before remembering that Cha’s house special uses ice cubes made with actual milk tea. Oh, well. I fared better with the appetizer, a boiled meat platter of large intestines and goose guts that sounds like a recipe for disaster but proved to be a chewy, lightly-scented treat. Trust me: When it comes to intestines, the more formidable the scent, the more formidable the aftermath.

To take the meatiness down a notch, my friend then decided to order a tofu-with-scallops dish, a combination I secretly feared would be badly mismatched. Luckily, we both found it to be the right kind of mishmash. The soft, fragile texture of the tofu complemented the hard yet pliant texture of the scallops, and a fragrant black bean sauce washed away any residual concerns.

But the raison d’etre of Hong Kong cafes remains stir-fried rice noodles with beef, a heaping mass containing broad slabs of rice noodles, tenderoni beef, and an occasional green or three thrown into the mix. In fact, it’s a spitting image of the pad see-ew; only, instead of repeating Thai cuisine’s “sugar and spice equals everything nice” mantra, it indulges in ginger-fication, with garlic and black bean sauce rounding out the rest of the equation.

At Cha’s, the dish in question doesn’t disappoint, though be careful not to line up too many hearty entrees in one sitting. That’s because you’ll need to leave one final compartment open for the big finish: the Portuguese egg tart, or “dan ta.”

There’s only one acceptable place in Shanghai to go to for Portuguese dan ta (though they’re most commonly found in Macau), and I won’t bore you by pretending that it’s some diamond in the rough. No, this is the venerable institution known as Lillian, with locations all over the city, where for three-and-a-half kuai (about 50 cents), crispy, egg-y, crème-brulee-y, slightly-burnt-around-the-edges, and totally-creamy-in-the-center (especially if you pop that baby into the fridge for a spell) join forces for the ultimate in puff pastry, uh, puffery.

If you’re wondering why in a piece documenting the virtues of the Cantonese café, a Macanese specialty gets last mention… well, that’s because love (of food) knows no ethnographic boundaries. We’re all slaves to our stomachs, and the Portuguese dan ta brings to the fore all our wanton ways of eating on impulse. How many bites does it take to get to the center of a dan ta? As many as it takes to get egg smeared on your face.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under Shanghai.