don’t get me wrong, I like Chinese food but I couldn’t live on it permanently. In Nanjing it was easier because the local food was much better than in Shanghai. There is a limit to the amount of fried rice and noodle soup I can eat so sometimes I like to have a blow-out and feast on some comfort food which reminds me of home. What could be more British than a full roast Sunday lunch. If I had known Glo London did Sunday roasts I wouldn’t have ridden past it so many time on my bike, I would have stopped!
I was meeting another British friend for lunch and we picked this place as neither of us had been there and were delighted to find that it had a magnificent carvery. We piled out plates high with roast pork, lamb and beef and all the trimmings including even Yorkshire pudding. What a treat. I had decided to bring the bottle of birthday Champagne which had been in the fridge for over two months and secretly opened it under the table. Luckily the restaurant was noisy and busy and nobody heard the ‘pop’ of the cork been pulled.
Timing it right so that none of the waiters were looking, we managed to consume the whole bottle without drawing attention to ourselves.
Food has the ability to transport you back in time to a completely different place. Whether it’s sitting in Pain Chaud on Yong Kang Lu eating croissant and drinking coffee first thing in the morning or eating fish and chips in Sailors on a Friday night or a huge roast dinner in Glo London, it’s easy to forget you’re in Shanghai. All around us in these places are foreigners speaking English, French, German and other European languages. Of course there are Chinese too, struggling to negotiate a big piece of roast meat without realising that you need to use the knife to cut it into smaller pieces rather than trying to stick the whole thing in their mouth.I suppose they would say the same about westerners trying to use chopsticks for the first time.
Winter has well and truly arrived in Shanghai and I am getting into the habit of making soup – it’s cheap and healthy and takes me back to British winters with mother making warming soup for the family. Today it’s cauliflower soup, last week it was watercress. I say ‘watercress’ although I am not sure what it was and am pretty sure now that it wasn’t but it tasted good and I didn’t make me sick so that’s a success. At least you can’t mistake a cauliflower! Wish me luck.