Yu Garden: a Culinary Experience

Yu garden (or Yuyuan Garden) is for the moment my favorite place in Shanghai. It is a closed garden constituted of beautiful traditional Chinese buildings (article coming soon!). Even though the environment itself is pretty spectacular, today I am going to talk about the food you can eat at the Yu garden. 

Yuyuan garden is basically where you should go if you want to have an incredible amount of choice in a small place (though the food is more expensive there, probably because it is a touristic place).

My roomie Ling and I wandered around in quest for great food. We ended up in this restaurant where everything, from walls, to floor, to furniture, is golden. To order, you get to the diverse stands, where some sample food is displayed, and make a choice.

The “problem” with this kind of restaurant is that actually everything looks good, so it is really hard to make a choice! Besides, there is no menu, so you just get to choose depending on what your meal looks like (hoping that there are no weird secret ingredients in it).

Sometimes it can actually be hard to guess if the food displayed is an entry or a dessert! Some of it can also be extremely spicy.

Outside of all the restaurants, you also have street stands, displaying cheaper (but still tasty) items. An interesting candy is this fruit skewer poured in melted sugar that children seem to love.

Sometimes, you can also encounter some “off topic” shops. There is one Turkish ice cream place there, and also this shop where they sell gummy candies.

Among all this food, we finally went for some:

1. Some tea. Well we did not really buy it, we actually had this degustation at some tea place (and ended up not getting any tea, oops)

2. Dumplings! Article coming soon on this (since it is my favorite Chinese food). It is basically a sort of Chinese ravioli filled with vegetables or meat and warm soup. Ling knew about this street stand that was amazing. There was a huge line of locals (that’s how you know you are going to eat something incredible). Some nice Chinese man advised us on what we should take.

They were basically the best dumplings I have ever had (and I can tell you I eat quite a lot of them). The base was thin and not sticky, and they were filled with a delicious mix of pork and crab as well as some slightly oily soup.

 

 

I will definitely come back!

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