Better than ordinary 家常菜

On almost any corner in China you will find a place claiming to serve "家常菜" or "homestyle cooking". Sometimes this means they serve dishes known to the specific city or town, but other times the menu is made up of an array of generic Chinese food. Quality can also range form incredibly tasty to incredibly bad and it's really hard to tell expect from word of mouth or trial and error.

We are in Shanghai this weekend, staying with our friends Alex and Sean, and last night they took us to their favorite Shanghainese 家常菜 place. The place looked like any other nondescript, fluorescent-lit neighborhood restaurant with plastic garbage bag table cloths and dirty floors.

I did see something new though: at the table next to us sat a man, a woman, and a white poodle with a dyed pink tail. Not only was the poodle sharing the chair with the woman and actually sitting "at" the table, but on several occasions the man took a pair of chopsticks (luckily not the pair he was eating with) and fed morsels of his food directly into the dogs mouth! I was in too much disbelief to even try to take a picture of this.

Regardless, the food was really good and with a few small tweaks took ordinary "homestyle" cooking a notch higher. Some of the highlights:

Selection of cold appetizers: golden needle mushrooms, boiled edamame, and 四宝烤麸(have never been quite sure what it actually is, but found it translated as 'marinated bran dough with peanuts and black fungus' - trust us, it's good)

Main Courses: clockwise from top: 吓人豆腐 (tofu with baby shrimp) - a pretty standard dish and probably the weakest of the dishes we had; 橄榄四季豆 (string beans stir fried with ground pork and olives - a slight deviation from the standard stir fried string bean dish and one I really liked despite usually having an aversion to olives); and a tofu dish whose name I didn't catch that was also tasty and different from the standard fare.