A short walk from our B&B is Julu Road, one of my favorite roads in Shanghai. There’s a great bookstore called Dukou Bookstore which I like a lot. After we spent a good amount of time there we headed off to People 7 down the street. People 7 is a “trendy” lounge + restaurant that served modern Chinese cuisine. Its original branch is in Taipei.
There is no sign and the entrance seems like a dead end (as seen in the picture, at the top of the stairs there’s only two blank wall on each sides and a wall with 9 lights facing you). Apparently you suppose to get a “code” when you make reservation in which you touch the lights in certain pattern to get in. We didn’t make reservation so I just slammed the wall on the left few times and it slided right open. The first two floors are the bar/lounge area, it’s quite predictably trendy and was way too dark. The restaurant is on the upstairs patio.
A pretty tall glass of Kiwi juice.
People 7 House Salad 48: Mango, Grapefruit, Apple, Crab, Shrimp, Lettuce. It’s pretty to look at but I’m not sure the combination worked. I didn’t like the mayonnaise-based dressing that is often used in salad at Asia. I felt like something more acidic would be better.
Spare Ribs in Plum Sauce 58 Like a high end version of Sweet and Sour Pork but it’s still yummy. The flavors were controlled and the meat had perfect crispy + chewy texture.
Sichuan Stone Cooked Fish. It came as a bowl of stones, then the server poured the spicy broth and fish (already cooked) into it. It’s very spicy but very good.
Three Bite Rice: Mini DongBo Pork, Mapo Tofu, Egg Fried Rice 38. We tried to stuff ourselves at the end but turns out it’s really as mini as the menu said.
Green Tea Rice Balls, Wine Dreg, Osmanthus, Nata de coco in Sweet Wine Soup. Very delicious! It’s icy and refreshing. It’s the only dish that I got the ‘Nouveau Chinese Chic’ feeling.
The food was tasty and fun to eat, but it’s not as high concept as they claimed. The menu description was cleverly written by a good copywriter. After this dinner, three of us had upset stomachs that never really fully recovered for the rest of the trip. I wonder what caused it (I wonder if it’s the Wine Dregs or the Sichuan peppers).
People 7
805 Julu Road, Shanghai, China
Tags: Chinese, fashionable
Boo to upset stomachs! 🙁
Oww, no matter how clever the interior design, how cool the menu and even how tasty the food, upset stomach is… T__T Julu is a cute name for a road! The bookshop you linked seemed really nice too ^^
Hey RP! Ah we chose ‘nicer’ place purposely so we won’t get upset stomach, turns out…. -__-;;; That Dukou bookstore is great! I just love these little places for liked mind people to relax and hang out. All the books are pre-selected based on the owner’s taste (so you’re not swimming in a 5 floors Barnes and Noble ish building with lots of crap books distracting you), and obviously she’s an artsy/literature/film-centric girl. A local was there and asked where the owner’s from, she said she’s from Xi’an, and the local customer said, ‘ah but of course, local Shanghainese would never open store like this’ (implying local would only want to make quick buck).
I also found the Chinese book/graphic designers are really top quality (compare to HK and Taiwan). There’re so many books that I just wanted to buy for design sake. I bought these really pretty designed San Mou’s books~ The Beijing published “Eileen Chang” collections are so beautiful too (while the Taiwanese ones are so arghhh).