Americatown

We haven't been able to update the blog since coming back from our weekend in Shanghai, so I'm going to start from there and try to get caught up through this week.

As written up in the preceding entry, we tried some authentic homestyle Chinese food our first night in Shanghai. That was basically the last time we ate anything remotely Chinese during our stay. Owen was battling a bit of a stomach bug and there is such a plethora of edible western food that we took a vacation from Chinese food. If you were so inclined, you could live in Shanghai (well at least the French Concession area) like it's the LA or NYC version of Chinatown.

We certainly did for the remaining two days of the weekend. Meals included:

Dinner at Trattoria Isabelle - cozy Italian place where we had the third floor to ourselves and enjoyed food we'd make for dinner at home (food was good but at the same time would not be something we'd go out to eat back in the States since we could just make it ourselves)

Complementary bread with olive oil and vinegar for dipping

Started with a tomato mozzarella salad

With two simple pastas as our main course (penne with garlic clam sauce and traditional penne bolognese)

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Brunch at Element Fresh where Owen opted for breakfast with french toast and Alex, Sean, and I opted for lunch with fresh salads and sandwiches. Unfortunately I was so engaged in my Mediterranean chicken salad that I forgot to take a picture, but I did find a photo online of their fruit smoothies, which were as good as they look.******
We didn't have room for dessert that afternoon, but if we did, we could have gone down the block from Alex and Sean's place and had decadent dark chocolate ice cream or cake at Awfully Chocolate.

We did go in and taste the dark chocolate ice cream, and I can vouch that they sell the real thing. Even Alex, who doesn't have a huge sweet tooth, likes their chocolate cakes.

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Breakfast to go from Paul's bakery, supplemented with a nutella-like chocolate hazelnut spread (purchased from a western supermarket reminiscent of what Jason's was for Singapore in the early 90s) for our train ride back to real Chinese life in Hangzhou.

Six grain baguette, poppy seed roll, raisin crossaint, and chocolate hazelnut spread - not a selection you often see in the rest of China