The Reader dines out at the Shanghai in La Jolla

Author

By Jeff Weinstein

Publish Date

Dec. 7, 1972

The egg roll pastry (but not the filling) is the best I’ve ever eaten

I believe one can eat a good meal in a bad restaurant and vice versa, because so many factors other than food and service affect the elusive shadow of enjoyment: your idiosyncratic hunger perhaps, the warmth or sterility of the room, or the look in the eyes of a person you’re with. But for some - for me, certainly - food is primarily important, and no amount of liquor or love can wash away the disappointment of a tasteless lump of fish or a stale fortune cookie. And good restaurants are rare. The Shanghai, on Prospect Street in La Jolla, isn’t perfect, for some of the selections on the menu are wonderful while others are surprisingly bad. But it is a good restaurant, which cooks and serves food with a palate - eye to flavors - strong flavors, subtle flavors.

It’s hard to eat in a box; corners cry for softening, and tables and people look like isolated units scattered in unwholesome cartesian space. The Shanghai, which could have been such a box, eliminated the ceiling with a false top of bamboo mesh, painted the room a fine rich orangy-red, and partitioned the room properly, to create eating areas. When it first opened, it had a pleasant full-length bar and a wonderful bartender (woman ), but although the bartender is still mixing drinks and is still wonderful, the bar has shrunken to a bar-ette to allow more room for tables. There are enough waiting people in the Shanghai to serve everyone well, and the service is friendly and careful, although some waiters are more adept than others in understanding that you don’t want MSG in your food (all Chinese restaurants I’ve eaten in use too much MSG unless you request otherwise), in knowing when wine should be served, or how slowly you want to eat. The wine list, by the way, is small and good, with four perfectly excellent California whites and a number of less good reds and roses. I find beer to be a happy drink with such food, or lemon and water if you are more of a purist.

Such food? The menu is large, and part of the enjoyment of the prospect is imagining, before you cat, the possibility of flavors and combinations. The Shanghai has its own “Shanghai-type” specialties, which on the menu are noted in darker print. Particularly spicy hot dishes are asterisked (and are almost all very good), and some others, like whole duckling, must be ordered in advance. All the Shanghai specialties I’ve had were fine. The soups are uniformly good, and you can make a whole meal of the abalone soup and some white wine. To generalize about the other types of dishes: the appetizers are good but not unusual, and the egg roll pastry (but not the filling) is the best I’ve ever eaten. The shellfish dishes, especially the Shanghai lobster, are savory and well cooked, and the chicken dishes are less rich but flavorful. The vegetables, by themselves and in the other dishes, are great: fresh and full of paradoxical crispness that is the result of quick cooking. The braised broccoli and the pea pods are particularly fine, although they are sometimes too oily and mixed, unaccountably, with canned mushrooms. The beef and fish dishes are okay; I’ve had good and bad, but the beef is overpoweringly salty. What is not good is the pre-prepared duck; all the duck juices (not fat) that give the meat its sweet taste are just driven out by the Shanghai's overcooking, and for $4.50(!) one night we were served a very small platter of charcoal with some petrified duck lurking deep within.

Let me mention two more things: these meals can be expensive, especially for one or two people, when a pleasant and not overlarge dinner, with drinks and wine, can cost S10.00 each. But, for some strange reason, if many people order at one large table, the resulting cost per person is much less; perhaps people eat less when they are busy sampling 13 different dishes. That is not the way I like to eat. however, and I think the greatest mistake people can make when ordering Mandarin or any other land of Chinese food is when everyone follows his or her predilection: one for sweet and sour sea bass and another for hot spiced beef, and from the mass of little platters each person eats things that inevitably war with each other. Because I do that sort of thing myself too often. I decided to dictate and order what I alone thought would be the perfect Chinese meal-of-the-moment (for two) at the Shanghai: