We went on a breakfast tour with untour food tours. It started with a bit of a route march to the starting point because it was further away than I realised (with hungry moaning children in tow) but there turned out to be only us and two other people on the tour and they didn’t seem to mind too much (or were too polite to say so). We started by crossing the Xiangyang Park, admiring the dancing elderly people and so forth, and spotted some rapidly evaporating water calligraphy:
..before strolling through the Old French Concession to our first stop, where we ate youtiao, which are sort of doughnutty sticks, in pairs, which we pulled apart and dipped into a soy milk and tiny shrimp soup. We also tried a couple of different types of bings – flatbreads – one savoury and flavoured with the ubiquitous spring onion, the other stuffed with sugar.
Onwards through some tiny back alleys and to a succession of tiny cafes. We tried spicy not-in-soup wontons, steamed buns with different fillings (sweet black sesame, pork, spring onion and veg), various types of dumpling, learning how to manage soup dumplings (and learning how they are made, which is by using soup that solidifies to jelly when it is cool) (I think Tamsin ate all the dumplings). We watched a man hand-pulling noodles, which we ate with a soy sauce and what I learnt in Japan to call yuba, the skin of boiling soy milk. Haven’t found out what it is called here. Stopped for coffee in a funky modern cafe (cold-brew with coconut water for me. Cold brew yum, coconut water not so much.) that came with brownies with a peanut and szechuan pepper topping. Some in-soup wontons.
On to a jianbing stall – this is probably my favourite, a sort of crepe with egg, coriander, pickles, delicious sauce and a crispy wonton, but I could only manage a tiny taste by this point.
We all needed to walk a bit of that off so we went through a small wet-market to check out the amazing array of veg, seething eels in a crate, loads of different types of egg, and bits of animals that I don’t really see as food thankyouverymuch.
Then pudding, Hong Kong egg waffles.
and that was all at breakfast time?! Wowza. But also, book me a ticket! Looks amazing. I like the sound of the doughnut sticks with shrimpy dip – seafood churros?? Are you close enough to these sorts of street food areas that you could, in time, visit on your own?
We would definitely be brave enough to do it on our own next time. In fact, we had the churros-y things this weekend too, randomly as we walked back from a morning out.
Oh! It all sounds so yummy and interesting. I was thinking while I read, “oh I like the sound of that”, and “mmm, would love to try that”, although perhaps not all at once and not all for breakfast. But then I realised that if I were ever to visit Shanghai I would not be able to risk tasting any of it because of my allergy to MSG, and it made me realise I will simply never be able to risk visiting any part of China at all. ☹️ I will have to live it vicariously through you! I’m so enjoying the blogs and photos. Keep ’em coming.
I think if I moved to China for three years, they would need a bariatric aeroplane to bring me home. When I visited the food absolutely blew my head off: the variety, the freshness, the sheer, glorious inventiveness of it.