The Chinoise Story

No. 59 Maoming Road W. Nothern buidling of Jin jiang Hotel // 上海 茂名南路59號(hào)，錦江飯店一層。

Chinoise Story has created a perfect ambience that draws you in as soon as you enter. The low tables are arranged in a cosy crescent shape that gives you personal space and privacy but at the same time allows you to notice the other diners and be drawn into a sort of communion with them; a sense which is added to by long windows which are very high up thus letting in a lot of light but giving no view on the outside world except for the sky. The focus is kept on the immediate surroundings giving a sense of being in a peaceful, sealed-off sanctuary.

Chinoise Story specializes in marrying innovative techniques to traditional Shanghainese dishes. Care is taken with presentation and imaginative paring of foods. Their signature lobster dish comes on a long rectangular white plate. The lobster shell is perched on the left hand side next to the lobster flesh prepared in three different ways presented in a row: deep fried with egg yolk, stir-fried and, finally, sautéed with wasabi. This final wasabi-soaked piece has a piece of watermelon skewered to its base with a tooth pick. Watermelon and wasabi? You wouldn’t expect it to work, but it does, and brilliantly – the watermelon douses the fire of the wasabi. Each dish at Chinoise Story comes with unexpected flavours and combinations so that you’re sure to leave with the horizons of your palate broadened.

Perhaps the real attraction is the painstaking care taken with each and every dish which brings not only wonderful flavours, but a sense of almost home-cooked comfort. Take their meatballs, for example. Instead of being made from mince processed by machine. The meat is hand chopped. The final result are light succulent and textured meatballs rather than processed pap. The chef, Jackie, invited me in to watch the process of making these meatballs. First he takes slabs of succulent, lean pork. He told me that the traditional meatball should use quite fatty meat, but times have changed, and Jackie prefers to make them with very lean meat. The chopping is done with two huge meat cleavers, one in each hand. Rhythmically they pound the meat and slowly turn it into mincemeat. The lack of fattiness is made up for by adding some finely chopped exotic mushrooms. Like fat would, these play a diluting role to de-intensify the flavour of the lean meat and make a softer, richer flavour.

The chicken and carrot soup is boiled for 12 hours before it comes to the table. What they strive to get is a one-on-one ratio of chicken to chicken soup. In other words each litre of soup is made with one kilogram of chicken meat. This extraordinary level of concentration can only be achieved with slow painstaking boiling. The soup literally becomes a chicken liquefied. The carrots are also boiled along with the soup so that by the end the soup is permeated with a pale orange colour. The soup comes to the table just like that: thick, orange tinted and translucent. The consistency is rather like shark-fin soup, and it has that same quality of being filling, comforting and truly “hitting the spot”.

Chef, Jackie, also understands how important getting the right raw materials is. One of Chinoise Story’s signature dishes is a giant shrimp stir fried in a delicious chilli and honey sauce. A sauce as mouth-watering as this would make anything go down a treat. But in this case the shrimp itself was absolutely packed with flavour. The trick? Simply choosing the right shrimp at the market – neither too young or too old. The shrimp is stir-fried over a very hot wok and a huge number of ingredients are added including finely diced peppers, honey, soy sauce, sprinklings of many different coloured spices. These sear themselves onto the prawn and then, after what seems like no time at all, the shrimp is plopped onto the middle of the plate. The sauce from the wok is then drizzled over it.

Another speciality of Chinoise Story is strips of goat’s meat stir-fried with diced green capsicums. The goat’s meat simply oozes flavour. For those of us brought up on the bland pap that we call lamb in the west, this will be a real revelation. Again Chinoise Story’s talent for combining flavour is in evidence here. On its own goat’s meat can be a bit too fatty and greasy, the capsicums are a perfect balance sharpening the flavour up and giving the dish an edge.

Chinoise Story is also good at the Shanghai classics such as “Xiao Long Bao” and spring rolls. I’ve always loved these sorts of snacks. But Chinoise Story shows how they really ought to be done. As with everything the difference here is intensity of flavour and attention to detail. The spring rolls are perfectly crisp without a hint of greasiness. The Xiao Long Bao are packed with delicious lean juicy pork.

Great atmosphere, fantastic food – it doesn’t get much better than Chinoise Story.

Service quality:

excellent

Food quality:

excellent

Environment:

very good

Price per head (RMB):

200-300

This article is brought to you by Best Food in China (www.bestfoodinchina.net ). Best Food in China is the first and leading English-medium website featuring reviews on food, cuisine and restaurants in China. For more information, please visit www.bestfoodinchina.net.