October 28, 2009 4

Yuan Yuan 圆苑 (Shanghai)

By in 08: Shanghai, Favorite Food Entries

Here’s our first real dinner at Shanghai.

We went to Yuan Yuan, a local fine dining restaurant chain that has branches in China’s major cities. They specialize in traditional Shanghai cooking with a modern presentation. We went to the one at the posh Westgate Mall on Nanjing Xi Road.

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The interior is pretty modern Chinese Chic. The complimentary appetizers were tasty and addictive (a bit MSG-ish though).

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Braised Pork with Brown Sauce. A very unhealthy dish that’s really good. The pork was cooked very tenderly and the skin+fat part were gelatin-like. The soy sauce was sweet but never too overwhelmed. Surprisingly, it didn’t feel greasy nor heavy.

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Chinese dates stuffed with glutinous Rice. Addictive and not too sweet, very lovely! Supposedly it’s good for beauty too (this is more like a dessert).

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Vegetables to ‘balance’ our meal.

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Crab Roe Fried Rice. Seems like we have crab roe in every post, but that’s because October was Shanghai’s regional “Mitten Crab” season! (post on that coming soon)

Before the trip I worried if I’ll get tired of the Shanghai flavors, which is always loaded with the sweeten brown sauce that could get one note. Even though we never order ‘braised brown sauce’ dish again in this trip, I found myself secretly craving it all the time.

Yuan Yuan 圆苑
7/F Westgate Mall, 1038 Nanjing Xi Lu (by Jiangning Lu)

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4 Responses to “Yuan Yuan 圆苑 (Shanghai)”

  1. weezermonkey says:

    What an awesome meal! I’ve never had dates stuffed with glutinous rice. Looks so yummy!

  2. Everything looks so beautiful! I too have never tried dates with glutinous rice before. The braised pork is plated so artfully it almost doesn’t seem like it is just braised pork! I’ll keep these posts in mind if I ever get to go back to Shanghai again :).

  3. seat says:

    AW~~!! Chinese dates stuffed with glutinous Rice looks so good!!
    I understand you don’t want to waste your stomach space for white rice but white rice + Shanghai Braised Pork(東po肉?) is heaven!

  4. Freda says:

    Seat, I hope you were there with us! More white rice would probably do us good because we got upset stomach the 4th day and on (from the richness of the food? unclean? too much crab? from the yeast dessert? I never knew why)

    Yes weezermonkey and ETE, I wonder where we can eat that dates with glutinous rice here? They do fill you up and we could barely finish half of it…so sad to see them all go to waste.