A stone gate, then a kitchen
Shanghai Shikumen Fine Cuisine occupies the ground floor of a lane house off Sinan Road. The cooking is benbang — the local register of soy, sugar, vinegar, and wine — and the room is small on purpose.
What a shikumen is
The word means stone warehouse gate. From the 1860s through the 1930s, Shanghai filled its concessions with lilong: tight lanes of terrace houses that borrowed a Jiangnan courtyard and a European row. The gate was stone, the doors were wood, and a family lived behind both.
Lane 48 kept its frame. The carved lintel is worn smooth at the height of a shoulder. Guests come in off the wet stone, past the gate, and sit where the front room used to be. There is no lobby.
How the kitchen cooks
Benbang cai is the food of this city, not a tour of every region. Red-braising does the heavy work. Pork belly goes into soy, rock sugar, and Shaoxing in the morning and is not touched for show. The smoked fish is fried, then sweetened until it shines. The drunken chicken cools in wine until the jelly sets.
Dumplings are a separate discipline. The soup inside a xiaolongbao is stock, reduced and jellied, then melted again by steam. If the wrapper breaks in the steamer, it does not leave the kitchen.
A day on Lane 48
Stock for the dumplings, a fresh pot of scallion oil, and the belly into the braise. The lane is still quiet enough to hear the steamer lids.
Lunch service is short. Between sittings the rice cakes are soaked, the shrimp are sorted by size, and someone walks the room to reset the celadon.
The lanterns go on before the first seating. Tables turn once, sometimes twice. At the end of service the gate is barred and the upstairs windows go dark.
Lane 48, Sinan Road, Huangpu, Shanghai. +86 21 5388 1948
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