访谈录 2010-04-12&04-15 上海小吃

Shanghainese food, you definitely have to try.

Every week, here have around 15 restaurants open.

They start to do experiment with new kind of food.

You can have like world class international dining experience and at the same time you can like just walk down the street.

Now that’s where I want to start, the place where a lot of young Shanghainese get their daily meals, the street.

Here we are in Shanghai’s Wu Jiang food market, the place is amazing, actually it is really packed. We are here in the late evening, and you can get lots of good things to eat here. These are vegetable dumplings, just try out this street vendor 2, very good, let’s see what else we can find. Here is another Shanghai staple 3, rice noodles, basically with some meat, parsley and spices. This time, it is very spicy 4, that’s why this people by the camera laughing. Wu Jiang food market is actually a really fun place to hang out, and then there is this, squid on a stick, so he’s cooking the whole thing together, onions, soy sauce, chilly 5 spice, here it goes, ready? Definitely some chilly pepper. Slight taste of tyre tread. There is one thing for sure about Chinese food is: it’s got a lot of flavor.

Believe it or not, I am still a little hungry, but I wanted to get away off the beaten path. If you love seafood 6, this is the place to beat. Here we are at Tong Chuan fish market, this place is huge and it has almost anything you can think of. If it swims you can buy it here.

Shanghai sits right on the East China Sea, so seafood is even more popular here than in the rest of the country. And Chinese penchant 7 for eating nearly anything won’t disappoint you here. There are sea creatures here, I didn’t even know it existed, unbelievable, shapes and shells and mussels. This place is almost like a century overloaded 8 like crustations and sea creatures.

Another great thing about the wet market is that in the midst of all the mollusks, eels 9, sea cucumber squid, octopus 10, crustations, and general unrecognizable creepy crawly slimy scaly 11 fin 1 wearing, and at times alien-looking aquatic 12 creatures, you will also get an authentic 13 slice of Shanghainese life. In between all the stalls, you will find people playing mah-jongg.

As it must be obvious by now, I love food, and consider it an essential part of travel. So I often look for places like this, but Tong Chuan takes the cake. It’s just the kind of travel experience to get you away from the tourists masses into the essential spirit of Shanghai. And I think I finally found dinner. These are in season right now, this is a hairy crab 14, you can tell these weird 15 tops of hair on both of the pincers. The hairy crab is actually a distinct Shanghai specialty 16, so I think this is dinner.