Gorgeous Granddaughter Sofia here, reporting live from Shanghai, China (in case you confused it with some other Shanghai). I’m here for a couple of weeks visiting a friend who was an exchange student at my high school this year. True to HG tradition she will be known here as EFM: Excellent Friend Marine.
Shanghai is an amazing modern city with many things to recommend it, the most important being (from an HG family point of view, anyway) the food. On one of my first days here, EFM, worried that I wasn’t getting enough to eat (from being invited to dinner at BSK and HG’s house she knows that my family does not take kindly to small quantities of food), took me to brunch at a restaurant near her family’s apartment named Paradise Dynasty. She ordered me a basket of soup dumplings (Xiao Long Bao). These soup dumplings were no ordinary soup dumplings however. They came eight to a basket, each a different flavor: original, garlic, luffa, foie gras, Szechuan, cheesy, crab roe and black truffle. The waitress was insistent on the correct order of how to eat them: clockwise around the basket. EFM was insistent on teaching me the correct way to eat them: biting the side to let the steam out and suck the soup out instead of biting off the top. Every single flavor was delicious, and I spent the rest of the day (which we spent at a wild animal park outside the city where I rode an elephant!) exclaiming on how amazing they were. My love for these multi-flavored dumplings gave EFM something new to worry about. Now she was concerned that my taste for soup dumplings was being corrupted by Paradise Dynasty’s modern, avant garde specimens. The next day, we took a trip to a restaurant (EFM scoffed when I asked her if it had an English name) in Yuan Garden which EFM claims everyone knows makes the best soup dumplings in Shanghai. Outside, people lined the benches, clutching take-out containers filled to the brim with dumplings. To get to the dining room, you have to go up several flights of stairs. When you’re seated, you are not given a menu; rather, there is a small card on the table that only has a few options. EFM ordered for the table: two baskets of soup dumplings (one crab and one pork), and the Mother Dumpling: a steamed crab bun, served in a special wooden container with so much soup in it you have to drink it with a straw. I, GGS, had found pure heaven and it came in the form of soup dumplings. The only downside to the experience was that my elder buddy HG couldn’t be there to experience it with me.
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