Ordering at a Shanghai Restaurant

Spicy Deep Fried Green Beans with Ginger

Before I went to China I was very apprehensive about going to restaurants. How will I know what to order?

The answer has been very simple, just look at the pictures. I was lucky enough to have a restaurant down the street from my hotel that has good food and a simple ordering process. The menu has pictures of each dish and an English translation. They give you an ordering sheet and you check off the the number of the items you want to order. This is very handy since everything else on the ordering sheet is in Mandarin. The waitress then takes your order sheet and the food starts to come, but not the way we are used to in the US. Basically they bring you your food as it's ready. For example one night I ordered spicy deep fried green beans with ginger, shrimp dumplings, and dessert parfait. Well the first thing that came to the table was the dessert parfait and a pot of tea. They do not serve water with your meal so I ordered a beer which did not come until the end of the meal. Then ten minutes later the beans were served, and five minutes later the shrimp dumplings. While the food was good this style of serving takes some getting used to.

Menu

The other thing that made it easy to eat was the food court at the Mall down the street. They had sit down restaurants, a bakery, Cold Stone Creamery, a fast food tempura stand, and my favorite, the barbecued pork bun stand.

Now there are plenty of things I would never eat but there was a huge variety of excellent food available. I can even go down the street and get a pizza if I so desired.