The Great Wall of China: More Like The Spectacular Wall AM I RIGHTby Randi / August 6, 2017
Whenever I talk about Shanghai, I sound like Stefon. “China’s hottest city is…Shanghai. It has everything – street misters, yogurt jars, film noir, unidentifiable meat on sticks, toon bags – it’s that thing where they stuff a handful of toon into an edible sac and you try to eat the whole thing without choking.” And I mean ‘hottest city’ in all the possible ways. Shanghai was so cool and fancy and swanky, well, most of it. It had an incredible skyline that we could sometimes see through the smog, and the fanciest luxury stores and air conditioned malls EVERYWHERE. And, also, it was the hottest I’ve ever been. In fact, Shanghai was experiencing a heat wave of temperatures the highest they’ve been there in 140 years – just in time for us! It was rough. But, fortunately, the city has so much to offer that it was able to break through our sweat-fueled crankiness and impress us. Screw the Ozdust Ballroom; Shanghai is China’s most swankified place in town.
View from the Bund, of Pudong the financial center across the river
Because of all the big buildings, the excited commotion of a finance city, all the busy people, and all the English spoken, we immediately felt like we were in London. Out of everywhere we’ve been in the past two months, Shanghai is for sure the most Londrish. It was nice to feel a little at home. It was sort of welcoming! Like a big sweaty pollution-filled hug from people who smell extra terrible from the heat. Speaking of that heat, the over-100-degrees-Fahrenheit-every-day heat with high humidity so I look like Monica in Barbados just permanently now, it was rough. Luckily, like most big Asian cities, there are malls EVERYWHERE. I know the western among you are like ugh malls are trash. Yeah maybe in America, but in Asia? They have a very important purpose, and that is for respite from excruciating heat. Air-conditioned, bubble tea filled respite. Yes, there are malls in Shanghai, like in Beijing and Bangkok, seemingly on every corner, and we needed to go into every single one for a break. We’d struggle to walk a block while drinking a gallon of water, and then stop in the AC and find bubble tea (I’m obsessed). Then we’d struggle through the next block and go into the next mall to find another water bottle. Lather rinse repeat.
Shanghai was ready for this heat though, well, thanks to Pepsi, because as we started our walk down The Bund from our hotel, we passed the first item on the Stefon list:
and what about that fiiiiine miister
WATER MISTERS! The photo didn’t capture it, but the top section is shooting out mist to cool off those walking by. Such a great idea!
Our first order of business was indeed walking down The Bund, the famous river-adjacent street that was once the city’s Wall Street, where all the banks had grand historic buildings and is now filled with luxury brand stores. The water in the few convenience stores on the Bund is COSTLY, which says a great deal at least to me. One side of the Bund houses all the historic buildings, most of which have plaques sharing when in the grand old times this or that bank set up shop in what is now a fancy hotel or a Gucci. The other side is the Huangpu river and the view shared above, the famous skyline of Pudong, which has now taken over as the Wall Street-y section.
We decided after enough heatstroke-walking to get on the ferry to cross the river and go check out Pudong. A ferry ride seems like an appropriate early activity to see more of a city! There are of course expensive tourist boats that will take you cruising along the river, but, here’s a tip, if you just want to hop over to the other side of the city, there’s a regular commuter ferry that takes like 15 minutes and costs only 2 RMB! That’s like a quarter! Cheapest transportation I’ve ever encountered. I love loved the warning sign outside the non-tourist (but still fine for tourists to take) ferry.
For 2 yuan, it was as much tourist sightseeing as I needed! The windows were pretty grimy so the pictures of the city from the boat are blurry, but hey, it was fine. We got there.
Blursula through the window of the ferry
We decided to lose all our street cred from taking the commuter ferry and instead become full-on tourists by visiting the Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China and, at least in my opinion, the tallest building in the world. Why in my opinion, you are probably wondering? At 121 stories and 632 meters tall, the Shanghai Tower comes in second in the world rankings only to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. BUT, like most megatall buildings, the top of the Burj, the tip of its height, narrows into a spire! SPIRES DON’T COUNT FOR ME. It’s SO cheating to build a tall building and then after you build actually usable space to go wait but I wanna win the competition, so here’s a 100 foot long metal rod to increase my numbers. DISQUALIFIED. The Shanghai Tower actually has the highest occupied floor in the world, which is way more impressive to me than all these buildings counting the height of their antennae and thin little completely unoccupied towers and stuff. No dice, Burjess Meredith!
How cool is this building? The whole body of it twists and turns in a corkscrew, which is so impressive. This shape actually helps save $58 million USD in construction costs because it reduces wind loads, whatever the crap that means. Also, using all the glass (the entire outer skin is glass) saves energy costs because it allows in so much sunlight. It was designed by a US architecture firm. Good job America! I love that the skyscraper next to it looks like a baby in comparison. Tickets up to the observation deck are very expensive, if I recall correctly 180 RMB each, so about $25, which is normal for such a sight in the USA but like the most expensive activity in months for us! We wavered for a minute on whether to get them, but considering this is like A Big Deal and supposably totally worth it, we went for it and I’m so glad we did! I usually get so scared of heights (I almost passed out at the Sear’s Tower (I refuse to change the name) when I stood on the glass floor) but I felt very safe in this one. Oh also, you can pay extra to get in through the Fast Track line. Do that at Disneyworld or whatever. Don’t do it here. We went at like 2pm right in the middle of the busiest tourist season (July-August) and no one was in front of us in the regular line.
Not only does the Shanghai Tower have the highest occupied floor in the world, but it also has the fastest elevator in the world, designed by Mitsubishi, and the world’s tallest single-lift elevator. I don’t know how they are different, but they are. ALSO, most importantly for tourists, it has the world’s highest skydeck, or observation deck! Amazingggg.
|
|
That elevator is NO JOKE. Before I even realized we were moving, I noticed the screen and saw we were already at Floor 60. You don’t feel ANYTHING. Then I blinked and we went another 50 floors in an INSTANT. Now that is Japanese brilliance.
the sign on the escalator as you go down to the lift (kind of counterproductive but whatevs)
Once we got off the elevator at the observation deck, we were struck by the brightness and cleanliness of the big, bright space. We were so excited that we had such a sunny day for our viewing pleasure, and we made our way towards the big glass windows encircling the whole space aaaaand saw that we were oh yeah still in China and it was all smog all the time.
On A Clear Day You Can See FourFeetInFrontOfYou
I’m picking the very best of our pictures to share, because some of the sides were just full on fogginess. I wasn’t upset though! It’s not like we had bad luck that day, that’s just how it is! And we still got to see a good amount, and it was so cool. It’s just, you know, Shanghai abruptly ends! Shrug emoji!
From one side, you look straight down into the bottle-opener section of Shanghai’s other famous megatall observation tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center. The tickets to go to that building’s observation deck cost the same as the tickets for the Shanghai Tower, which seems silly considering how much higher, and cooler, it is from the Tower. I mean not to crap on the Financial Center, I’m sure you are very important, but if you are going to go up one Shanghai building, do the big one, right?
looking down onto the bottle opener/Shanghai World Financial Center
Around the bend of the observation deck, you run into a set of stairs going up to ANOTHER floor of observing! We kept getting higher! I’m king of the world!
We were also super hungry – we hadn’t eaten all day because HEAT but now it was like 4pm. Luckily, because this is Shanghai, the bottom floors of the Tower composed a retail space with lots of food court spaces. They even had a Bassett’s ice cream cart, straight out of the Northeast USA! I found a ready-made salad place that I didn’t realize wouldn’t make new ones, so when I asked for the vegetarian one with no egg, they just took the egg out of the container. Lol. Oh well, roll with the things like this that happen while traveling, and give the parts that were touching the egg to the husband.
It was a really good salad! Full of purple sweet potato and quinoa and pumpkin and falafel-pretenders and lettuce! I was so excited to have a good salad since we had just gotten off a train that very morning and travel makes me crave lettuce and vegetables.
Oh, side note, that train, from Beijing to Shanghai! I didn’t write a diary entry because it was just midnight to 8am. It was the fanciest train since St. Petersburg, very nice and clean, not smoky, and completely different from the other Chinese trains. They had slippers for everyone in plastic wrap! Each bed had a TV on the wall! If you book Chinese trains, try to get the G trains! (I think this is our only G, so sad.) So nice! BUT. But. We had the beds that were very first in our carriage, along the wall next to the door of the car. And for some reason, that means that the bones of the train, whatever fills the walls on those things, continued under our beds. So we didn’t have storage! There was nothing under my bottom bunk but like metal! So infuriating, we were the people with the most luggage on board! Luckily, the other people in our cabin didn’t have much so we stored under their beds. Not so luckily, one of those people had a child. See, in China, there are no laws, and so people do not buy seats or beds on trains for their children. (Oh is there a doozy of a story in this fashion coming soon.) So instead of sharing with two other people, we were sharing with three. (We also heard horror stories about how Chinese couples often don’t buy two beds but will share one tiny bed, which is much worse and super inconsiderate to force a whole nother adult into a train compartment.) But the young man who was in the other bed was NOT excited to be forced to sleep with a baby, so when he realized that, he peaced out! I guess he got the conductor to find him a new spot because we didn’t see him again. The baby was fine though. Cute! He made some noise in the night but like, so do I. That’s all I have to say about that.
I’m going to do a separate food post for Shanghai, but I’m sharing the Tower food court salad because it’s part of that sight and just makes sense. Guess what else that food court had? BUBBLE TEA! My favorite thing to drink after water! Weirdly, Shanghai..ians favorite drink is neither of those. Instead, you will see literally every single Chinese person on the street – in this heat – drinking little pots of white yogurt with a straw. Usually room temperature. SO GROSS. IT’S HOT OUT AND YOU’RE DRINKING YOGURT? MILK IS A BAD CHOICE! The yogurt pots are on display in every single food cart and shop window you pass all over town. It’s so weird.
The Shanghai Museum is shaped like a Chinese ding, a cauldron with three legs, I assume for cooking
Another day, we went to the Shanghai Museum, which our guide book highly recommended. The book said you could spend a whole day there, or at least a half day, which sounds like my nightmare and I was like hellll nooo but then I remembered that my husband likes to see everything in a museum so we were indeed there for an ungodly amount of time. Luckily, it was pretty interesting. There’s a bronze gallery, a sculpture gallery, a calligraphy gallery, a traditional furniture gallery, a coin gallery, a ceramics gallery, and more over four floors. Best of all, it pulls a London and is free! You have to wait in a long security line though to get in, and in the heat it was brutal. But, like malls, I learned that the best thing about museums (besides learning, I guessss) is that it’s a break from the heat! Hooray for air conditioning. Actually, the Shanghai museum was SO cold that I had to put a long sleeve shirt on! All this constant variation between the intolerable heat and the frigidness of air con is going to give me hypothermia.
Hilariously, my favorite section of this museum covering so much of Chinese culture and history was…the special exhibit sent from Hungary on Princess Sissy. Sorrynotsorry.
I also enjoyed some of the thousands-of-years-old Buddhist sculpture findings, like this cool slab.
slab fairy goddess
Getting to the museum is a bit frustrating because of police barricades all over People’s Square. You can’t just find the museum and head towards it. You get into the squarea around it by finding the correct underpass tunnel instead of just, like, walking above ground. Oh China. It was so annoying in this brutal heat to have to do so much extra walking but it was a very nice area, with big parks and nice views and trees and, all over Shanghai and actually most of China, recycling and garbage bins!
The coolest part of Shanghai (not temperature cool…it was never not sweltering, even in the middle of the night) was walking along the Bund at night and seeing the cool skyline of Pudong all lit up in its bright neon. It’s always incredibly crowded – 25 million people just living there, guys, not even counting visitors – but it’s worth it to enjoy the view.
We got to enjoy this view every night because our hotel was at the top of the Bund. We chose the Astor House Hotel because it is an important old historic building with lots of interesting history in its ballrooms and staircases. However, the oldness comes through, and it’s very clear that it was a luxury place one day, but one day long ago. The room was beautiful and comfortable and clean, but the hotel itself shows its age and is now very much a hotel primarily for domestic Chinese travelers, not international visitors. This was evident by the fact that, despite ostensibly speaking English, the hotel staff was impossible to communicate with. It was very frustrating. Incredibly, in our next stop, Nanxun, we stayed in a lovely boutique hotel where not one person in the whole town spoke English, let alone in our hotel, yet communicating solely via Google translate went much more smoothly and professionally than our attempts with the Astor House staff – which should not be the case for a place pretending to be a top hotel. Most of the time, every staff member on the floor had a badge that read ‘Trainee’, and they had no idea what they were doing. The lobby was chaos 100% of the time. Worst of all, the lobby had a grand cafe seating area that was very nice – but you couldn’t sit there unless you were ordering something. In the lobby! The only other seats for paying guests were just wooden chairs in a far corner by the front door, with no table or anything. Shame! Thank goodness we didn’t pay as much as the book says it costs. It wasn’t that bad for the price.
But the location was good, because it led us through the Bund all the time. One night on our walk home, we stopped at the other historic old hotel, the Fairmount Peace Hotel, which really has that 1930s Shanghai feel, that film noirishness, complete with a hallway of movie posters with all the movies about that era, including a family favorite:
Every night, the Fairmount has live jazz, but we didn’t realize that cover charge was exorbitant, so we left and went to the other live jazz show at the Peninsula Hotel, which just charges you for drinks and seemed just as good. They did the theme song from Coupling and I was soo excited I was singing along without realizing! I had these weird cranberry soda, white chocolate (sugar syrup), and black pepper (I know!) concoction that was really good!
As for other entertainment, I was gung-ho on seeing some Shanghai Acrobats, which I knew were special and unique and a must-see in Shanghai. The most recommended theatre for an acrobatic show was the Shanghai Centre Theatre, at the Shanghai Centre on West Nanjing Road. Tickets were expensive, like $40 or more, but we figured it would be worth it for some flying through the air with the greatest of ease and what not! But actually, I can’t recommend this show at all. It’s the biggest, most well known one, but as such it caters to tourists, and to the lowest common denominator involved, so it was dumbed down quite a bit and had like, 2 acts out of 8 or 9 that were actually strong acrobatics. Maybe 8 minutes of the almost two hour show was actually the kind of amazing physicality I wanted to see. The rest included a guy using one of those toys where you like hold a stick between two other sticks? That people do like on street corners? Another was a juggler. I mean it was impressive juggling but it was still juggling, and I didn’t pay for that. Another featured men throwing heavy vases and catching them with their ankle-crooks or necks or the tops of their heads, which the audience loooved and yes is impressive but again IS NOT ACROBATICS. The worst though, the thing that made me furious, was the magician. His main schtick? Turning everything into doves. He had five live doves hidden on him for that routine, and I think we all know what happens to doves in stupid shitty magic acts like that. I’m furious still and I have my strongly worded email to the theatre company ready to go if I can find out how to contact them.
But those two actual acrobatic acts were indeed amazing. One was two men doing a partner routine full of handstands on top of each other that were mind-blowing enough but that culminated with one holding the other just by the head, just with his hand. I mean. HOW. The other impressive one was a woman and man doing a very sexually charged routine on a pole, which was hilarious because 90% of the audience was children, but it was like a ballet, clearly telling a story and powerfully so. They did a lot of that ahhh-I’m-slipping-down-the-pole-I’m-gonna-crash-into-the-ground-JUST-KIDDING-I-STOPPED-MYSELF-WITH-MY-QUADS-AN-INCH-ABOVE-GROUND stuff. So I’m really glad I got to see those two amazing bits. I just wish the whole show was that and not stupid touristy drivel.
Speaking of stupid touristy drivel, we were seated next to an older New Zealand man and we chatted for a little before the show started. He asked us how we ended up here, and I proceeded to share every last detail about our trip – ‘we live in London and we flew to Helsinki and we took the Trans Mongolian train route through Russia and saw a lot of Russia and Siberia then we toured Mongolia and then we ended that train route in Beijing and we saw Beijing and now we’re in Shanghai also I had a UTI and diarrhea in Mongolia and my favorite thing is Broadway and puppies and I really love puppies and I really need to wash my hair tonight.’ Okay I didn’t say all of that stuff but it sure felt like it when I finished talking about our route, and his response was, “I meant how did you choose to see this show.”
I died, I am dead now.
The best part about the show was not even those two good bits though. It was the theatre’s location in the fancy pants Centre that we lovingly referred to as Expat Centre. It had EVERYTHING you could possibly want as an expat living in Shanghai, and I think that’s where lots of them do indeed live. First of all, the main part of the Centre is not the theatre, but is the giant Ritz Carlton Hotel – a beautiful fancy hotel (I used their bathroom of course) but it also has two residence blocks attached! Can you imagine being an expat in Shanghai and living in the Ritz residence building? Dayummm son! Okay, so not only is there that, but in the basement of the whole place is a fancy pants supermarket with all kinds of imported recognizable goods, and a Godiva ice cream stand. In the market. And a lot of fresh fruit and even green juice! Then, on one side of the Centre, is a Starbucks, several legit tea shops and juice stands, many fancy Chinese restaurants, many casual and good-looking Chinese and non-Chinese restaurants, a paella cafe, A VEGAN RESTAURANT (next post), an HSBC (our bank), a Parkway Health Clinic – the expat-focused medical practice I went to in Beijing!, a Parkway Health DENTAL Clinic, a massage parlor, a gym, literally everything you could want. If I lived there I would never leave the complex. I’d never have to! It was hilarious. Every corner we turned we’d find something else that would make us thing we were in London.
Not too far in the grand scheme of things (literally and figuratively) from Expat Centre was Xintiandi, an outdoor shopping complex that is suuper fancy. It’s like Rodeo Drive or something, a totally Westernized outdoor mall sort of thing but housed in beautiful old buildings reminiscent of Shanghai’s past. It’s pedestrianized as well as totally Westernized, with craft beer gardens on every corner, all the recognizable shops, Starbucks on every block as is the custom in China, and a complex-wide wifi (that I think only works on Chinese numbers, like most public networks here (and in Russia) that require you to put in a phone number to connect. Not a fan!). We didn’t spend too much time there since we weren’t shopping, and once you see the cool juxtaposition of modern brand shops being house in historic buildings, you get the point, but still it was cool to see. My favorite part is that pets are allowed, but as you can see in the picture above, they MUST be in carriages! What! Not even like, oh if your pet gets tired here’s a baby carriage for them. No, they MUST be in baby carriages. Oh China!
So, we really enjoyed our time in Shanghai overall, despite the heat, though we didn’t do that much in our limited time. We both agreed that we would happily (and relatively easily) return here from London in the future, if for no other reason than the food. The food was amaaazing. That’s the next post! You’ll have to read that one to find out what toon bags are!
Related Posts
Eating Vegan in St. Petersburg: So Much More than Buckwheat and Pickles
I knew St. Petersburg would be the easiest place of the summer for me to find vegan food, but I didn’t know it would be so good too! I made a HappyCow list a mile long before we left, but I barely scratched the surface of it because most regular restaurants had something I could eat. Being so close to western Europe means the vegan thing is starting to catch on, and there are a few restaurants that have gone all in with menus labelled with vegan options! For the most part though, you have to just figure out with your brain what dishes could be vegan, but there are lots of options. When all else fails, there’s Teremok, and there’s pickles, and there’s hleb (bread, the most important word to learn).
Right after leaving the hostel, we ran across the tiniest hole in the wall bakery with huge Georgian-style lavash breads in the window, the kind that’s a big floofy circle with two handles coming straight out the sides. I want bread handles! I went in and found an old babushka cooking her breads. That’s all it was, a tiny place with an old grandmama and her oven and her bread. The bread looked amazing and I asked for one. Well, first I tried to ask if it was just bread or if it was stuffed with cheese like that sort of thing sometimes is. Problem is, I didn’t know how to say “stuffed” and babushka didn’t know a lick of English. I knew how to say “with cheese” and “with milk”, so I said those phrases in question form, but she thought I was asking to get the bread with cheese on it, and she doesn’t do that, and so there was much confusion. I somehow got it across that ‘no cheese/milk is good’, then I THINK she said ‘just flour and water!’ or something to that effect, and we finally established that the magic looking fluffy as all get out bread was safe for me. Unfortunately, it being a tiny little hole in the wall, babushka couldn’t break the 1000 ruble bill we had – we had JUST gotten money and hadn’t been able to break anything and SHE wasn’t going to break it! Her breads cost 40 rubles! The change would wipe her out! So husband ran back to the hostel to make change (there was nothing in between, really) while I…tried to make conversation. It did not work but it was hilarious and fun. Another woman came out and I THINK she said she was from Georgia (the country), and after a few moments of me saying nonsense I realized she was asking where I was from, and like always I didn’t know whether to say USA or London so I said both. It was a lot of confusion on all fronts. Luckily, Husband got back soon and we bought THE BEST BREAD EVER. Of course I don’t have a picture of it or the babushka because I’m pretty sure it was all just a hallucination, but I will always remember this amazing bread and this ridiculously fun first encounter with Russian people.
pickles!
For dinner on that first night, we were around the popular (and well populated) Nevsky Prospekt, with all the side streets shooting off of it full of hopping restaurants. We looked at a few menus before choosing the very adorably titled Masha i Medved, or Masha and the Bear. They had a long menu, which yes means it is probably a tourist trap, but also means lots of options and higher chance of veg items. That’s the tradeoff, I think, with going to maybe more expensive touristy places – they usually have more vegetables. Of course we started with a pickle plate, and while I’ve never been a huge pickle fan, I am ready and willing to eat them all across Russia, especially because I couldn’t fit my bottle of probiotics in my overstuffed pack. The pickled mushrooms were kind of weird, but the pickled green beans were surprisingly yummy. Luckily the boys ate the hot peppers; I was in no mood.
Yummy eggplant and mushrooms (okay and red pepper) |
apparently I forgot to take a picture of my salad but you know what cucumber and tomato looks like! So here’s a pic of my glass of mors (cranberry ish juice) instead enjoy |
For my mains, I had lots of small veggie dishes to choose from. Most focused on potatoes and mushrooms, and I figure I’m going to be eating a lot of those two things (and not just because I know the words for them!) as we go more east in Russia. So I chose the cucumber, tomato, and red pepper salad, and the grilled eggplant & mushroom dish. Both contained red pepper, so it was a lot of red pepper, and you know I’m not the biggest fan of red pepper, but I need to not get scurvy so I did my best. Both were very basic, standard versions of their respective dishes, but that’s fine, especially when travelling. I just want vegetables. The stir-fry actually tasted really good. I liked it. Hooray for Masha. Hooray for the bear.
just realizing now that the box even says vegan and ‘no dairy’ oops forest for the trees
Back on the Nevsky Prospekt, we went into the Singers headquarters, which is now a huge bookstore, and I zeroed in on their snack section. And lo and behold, a box of bars! I spent decades reading the ingredients, or trying to, before realizing that they actually said the word ‘vegan’ on the front. Oh us vegans and our immediate flipping to the underside of the flap to get to the ingredients, never assuming that our work would be done for us! I bought three. They are amazing, some brand called ‘Take a Bite’, and I did, and I need to find more in Moscow because they are just like Larabars – raw mixes of nuts and dates and other dried fruit, and some with cocoa. Obsessed.
After dinner and before clubbing (just kidding) (well we did go to a bar really late) (so tired), we went into a cute little fruit shoppe to stock up for breakfast. I bought the most beautiful looking apples, a bunch of good looking bananas, and a box of cherries. I was obsessed with the bucket of cherries, and if I was allowed I would have jumped in. I love cherries, and I live on bananas, and giant apples, as big as you could find, are probably my favorite food in the world. So, even though I labelled everything and put them in the hostel fridge in a bag with my name on it, of course someone stole my bananas and my magical apple. Of course. They left the box of cherries. They were sort of sour. Like my view of humanity.
love this cherry bucket! I also adore cutting into whole watermelons but we saw a lot of watermelon in our Kazakhstan researching so, saving for that
DO YOU SEE THESE INCREDIBLE PEANUT BUTTER FLAVORS THE CHERRY BUCKET STORE HAD??!! I can’t even get over it. I wasn’t allowed to buy them. No fun purchases! (No room, really)
cute little space!
Before our visit to the Hermitage, we went to the first of my HappyCow finds because the top review said it was right across from it. It’s a small cafe called Kafe Troitsky Most, because it is on Troitsky Most, the bridge over the nearest canal. It really is the best place to go when you visit the Hermitage because I didn’t notice much else nearby. So there’s a hot menu on the wall, but there’s a display case of several great looking salads. I asked if I could do a mix of salads and set about picking the best looking ones that I could clearly see were just veggies. I pointed to one in the back that had strips of brown and I asked if it was meat and the super nice lady said “nyet, soya!” They were soy meat strips and everything in the case was vegetarian! Everything in the cafe! Yippee! That soy meat salad was SOO good. I really liked everything, actually. I would totally return if we were here longer. My kind of place, just simple salads that you get to mix together and throw a piece of bread on top.
For a nicer dinner one night, we went to Cafe Botanika, another all-vegetarian place that we walked by at least 1400 times because it was between our hostel and all the things. I was so excited to go to a real sit-down restaurant that was all vegetarian. The menu spans many pages and includes sections of various cuisines, like an Indian section, a Chinese section, an Italian section, which is kind of odd but hey if you can do it, do it. While the food was fine, it was much better for vegetarians that it was for vegans. There weren’t many mains that were vegan, and in fact there were zero vegan mains under the Russian food section! Which is kind of ludicrous! Even it’s famous house burger was not vegan. I could have had pasta or an Asian tofu and veg stirfry, which is like hey I also could have stayed home and cooked for myself. Luckily, they had Russian vegan food for starters, so I got a bowl (more like cup) of borscht for my main and an avocado-filled salad to start. We also shared crudite and hummus, because if you have hummus I’m going to eat it. It was all fine, but I’m just kind of mad that there wasn’t more available. I am really glad I had borscht though, as unremarkable as it was, because here traditional borscht has meat in it. Botanika was a perfectly nice place and if you are vegetarian it would be incredible for you, but for a vegan looking for Russian food or even just stuff that’s interesting, there’s better.
we’re gonna need more hummus
the borscht had 4 kidney beans in it |
i like salad though |
We had great luck with Cafe Ukrop, a small chain of veggie cafes all over the center of the city. We went to two of them! The menu has vegan stuff clearly labeled, and is the complete opposite of Botanika in that stuff you would assume wouldn’t be vegan (like the ravioli and the vegetable cream soup) was indeed vegan. Fun! The food wasn’t anything special, but it was decent and healthy, and the place had a nice vibe and adorable decor, so it was just all good. It’s a sweet place where you can sit for hours because the seating includes sofas, comfy chairs, and even a few porch swings! There are also signs advocating cleaning up the environment and eating organic food. At least I think that’s what it said. It could have been anything.
We tried a lot of dishes over our two meals at two different locations. My favorite was the Caesar salad, not because the dressing even remotely resembled Caesar dressing, but because it came with fried tofu croutons. There were only 4-5 of them in the whole salad though, so they really need to add more to it. I was surprised by the Olivier Salad, it’s like a traditional Russian salad of tiny chopped potatoes, peas, and carrots formed into a circle and covered in mayo, but the vegan version was 1000x better than that nonsense (I’m guessing, because mayo blechh).
We tried a lot of dishes over our two meals at two different locations. My favorite was the Caesar salad, not because the dressing even remotely resembled Caesar dressing, but because it came with fried tofu croutons. There were only 4-5 of them in the whole salad though, so they really need to add more to it. I was surprised by the Olivier Salad, it’s like a traditional Russian salad of tiny chopped potatoes, peas, and carrots formed into a circle and covered in mayo, but the vegan version was 1000x better than that nonsense (I’m guessing, because mayo blechh).
better than it looks |
same for this one |
As for other starters, we had a mushroom soup that was decent, but it came with a little pot of sour cream, and even though the soup was marked as vegan, I just wasn’t sure about the sour cream. Husband wasn’t sure either and he usually can tell what’s vegan or not, so I’m a bit nervous about the whole thing even though this was days ago. We also tried the avocado cucumber rolls, which sounds like boring sushi but was more like roll-ups, with an avocado cream mixed with herbs inside strips of cucumber. They were fine, a good refreshing raw food dish when we needed some fresh vegetables, though maybe needed more flavor/salt.
cucumber rolls from the heavens |
mushroom soup with the devious sour cream. or not. we don’t know |
For main courses, we tried three – the ‘famous’ burrito, the ravioli, and the lentil burger. I think the burrito (more like a wrap (they are different) was the best of the three and the one I would order again. They said it was their most popular dish. Filled with smoked tofu, lentils, and various veggies, it was smaller and thus with less filling that western wraps/burritos. but it was pretty good. And I don’t know if the wrap was gluten-free, but they did that thing I love about gluten-free wraps where heating it turns the breading into a cracker. I don’t know why I just like it. Probably because anything resembling a soggy wrap makes me nauseous so if you’re gonna veer in one direction go towards the crackery and not the soggy. The ravioli was fine, a pleasant surprise that it was vegan, but it was because it was filled mostly with just greens, not a tofu ricotta like I expected or any sort of interesting play on the greens. Just sauteed plain greens. The tomato sauce it came with wasn’t great but hey they were still ravioli so still fine. The burger I liked, but it could have used more pickles and tomato – I didn’t even know they were on it until I was halfway through, the pieces were so small. The patty tasted a little like frozen peas, which is a little disappointing. It really needed a strong sauce to go on it and it would have been amazing. Kind of true of everything here. It was all decent and nice tasting but nothing was like wow. Still, it was all very satisfying, especially when traveling.
|
|
We also had great beverages from Ukrop – a very interesting grapefruit-basil juice, a beet-carrot-cucumber-apple kind of regular juice, and best of all a halva milkshake! It wasn’t really a milkshake, more of the UK-style of milkshake meaning flavored milk, but it was pretty great! It was just soy milk mixed with halva so you can’t go wrong. They threw in a handful of slivered almonds, some of which stayed on top for the picture while the rest floated down to the bottom, so we spent a lot a lot of time trying to chopstick them up.
juices yay |
halva milk yummm |
But honestly, probably my favorite place in St. Petersburg, and Husband’s too, is Teremok, a famous fast food chain. Russian fast-food, of course, so although it looks like McDonald’s, the already-made ready-to-be-tossed-down-the-counter dishes are blini and borscht and buckwheat porridges with all kinds of meat and cheese, etc. Blini, if you don’t know, are Russian pancakes but are more like crepes, usually stuffed with all manner of food, from savoury to sweet, meat to apple caramel sauce. When we went into our first of many, many Teremoks that we passed, I assumed it was a) just for a lark and b) not for me, considering blini have eggs and milk in them. Well luckily they gave us an English menu because otherwise I’d never have seen this remarkable menu section on a freaking fast food menu:
LENTEN VEGETARIAN MENU! GUYS, that is the dream! In most countries, the traditional food for Lent is vegan food. So that’s a great way to communicate what you’re looking for when you can’t speak the language. I was so excited and shocked to see this. Of course we went back to Teremok enough so I tried three of the four vegan options at least once, and happily they have more in Moscow. Even happilier, they just opened a branch in NYC! How ridiculous is that! That’s actually how we knew about them. Anyway, the buckwheat porridge is probably my favorite food so far. I love buckwheat, so there’s that, and it’s so simple with pickles and a few green onions and whatever, it’s plain and bland and healthy and that’s kind of what I love. Same with the vinagret (mixed chopped veg salad, usually with beet, in vinaigrette) and the pea soup. Plain, inoffensive, decent, healthy food. I’m obsessed. I can’t believe my fave place was pretty much Russian McDonald’s but if McDonald’s had such healthy and good vegan food I’d probably be there. Well just when traveling; I’m not a monster.
|
|
I knowww it ended up being buckwheat (with pickles) that was my favorite dish, the title of this post is so misleading. Not gonna change it. Oh we also ate at a Georgian restaurant and I had this boiled spinach and walnut pate (with more of my favorite bread) that was really good and it was topped with pomegranate so I’m going to share the picture just randomly right now.
I also went to a falafel place called Pita’s and had a very nice cabbage and orange salad and a falafel wrap! There are a few Pita’s across the city. The wrap with hummus is vegan, but apparently the ‘original’ wrap is not! But who would ever order falafel without hummus?!
So St. Petersburg was super vegan friendly and I didn’t even go to all the places on HappyCow! I didn’t even go to like 5 of them! It’s a great city in so many ways, and you will eat pretty well. We will see what happens in the next city!
Grain Store Unleashed: Poss Best Pop-Up Restaurant Ever
Not that I’ve been to many pop-up restaurants (have I?) or other things cool people do, but even so I’m pretty sure Grain Store Unleashed ranks towards the top. First of all, they have an all-vegan menu available (if you ask for it). Second of all, they had the best water speed I’ve ever seen outside of American Chinese food restaurants. And most importantly, all the food was good, some very good, some great.
Grain Store Unleashed, housed in the main restaurant area of the Zetter Hotel, was the summer pop up of the King’s Cross restaurant Grain Store. The actual/long-term Grain Store is a supposedly vegetarian-friendly restaurant that really isn’t. Every time omnivores want to eat with me, they suggest Grain Store because it’s so veg-friendly. But I mean, come on. They have a few vegetarian options, and vegan stuff is marked — but the only vegan dishes are bread, gazpacho, and sides. No mains. There’s a note on the menu that says some dishes can be made vegan, but it doesn’t say which ones. Also, seriously, not even one already-vegan main? You do not make my list for places I will give money to if I have to do all the figuring out.
But luckily for everyone, they put on Grain Store Unleashed, a much more adventurous and much more accommodating type of dining. If they are smart and/or nice, the restaurant will decide to either do the Unleashed-style pop-up again, or, better yet, add the vegan dishes to their subpar menu. Because this vegan menu was great!
But luckily for everyone, they put on Grain Store Unleashed, a much more adventurous and much more accommodating type of dining. If they are smart and/or nice, the restaurant will decide to either do the Unleashed-style pop-up again, or, better yet, add the vegan dishes to their subpar menu. Because this vegan menu was great!
|
|
GSU (not to be confused with probably 10 colleges) was one of the nicest meals I’ve had in London, so it pretty much blows that it was short-term. It offered three different set menu options: 4 courses for $28.50, 6 for $34.50, or 8 for $39. (As always, I mean the local currency (pounds here) but I only have the dollah on my keyboard.) I would normally be like hells yeah, give me the 8, but after close inspection, I saw that you only got a vegetable tartlet (hehehe TARTLET) out of that, plus both desserts instead of one. However, the second dessert was strawberries in Gran Marnier, which is like, first of all, I’m not going to pay you for fruit for dessert at a restaurant, thanks, but secondly, don’t ruin the fruit with alcohol. So 6 courses it was. You can also order a la carte but it didn’t make sense; 2-3 dishes and you’d be at the same cost so why would you do it!! Let’s look at all the food I ate!
|
|
Oh, funnily enough (is it), they had an amazing drinks menu. Normally I am just a tap water person, but these drinks were so interesting that I had to get one. Hoorayfully, the non-alcoholic options were just as cool sounding as the booze. While my two companions got the lavender margarita and fig daisy (the latter just for the name, I think, sounds like a book character), I got a really great bergamot and apple iced tea, which was a low-key level of sweet (yay) and had a good tinge of bergamot and apple, even though I have no idea with the former tastes like. I do remember it being in The Body Shop toiletries from when I was like 11 but that’s the extent of it. I also have been saying it wrong my whole life, apparently, because I thought I was being smart and fancy by doing a long-o, no-t sound, but apparently the last syllable is pronounced like the apple juice company. Do not like.
So the food! They started us off with an avocado toast plate, compliments of the kitchen, which is pretty much the greatest way to start off any meal. Or any kind of event, really. Avocado toast? That you weren’t expecting? That is free? Yippee! Unfortunately, it wasn’t a 100% perfect experience, because you could tell the puree came from avocados that they bought in this country (England). You could taste that they were not yet ripe when they were cut, and also that they never would have ripened anyway. That’s what avocados here taste like. Blergh. Still, not great avocado toast is pretty good.
So the food! They started us off with an avocado toast plate, compliments of the kitchen, which is pretty much the greatest way to start off any meal. Or any kind of event, really. Avocado toast? That you weren’t expecting? That is free? Yippee! Unfortunately, it wasn’t a 100% perfect experience, because you could tell the puree came from avocados that they bought in this country (England). You could taste that they were not yet ripe when they were cut, and also that they never would have ripened anyway. That’s what avocados here taste like. Blergh. Still, not great avocado toast is pretty good.
I will never frown upon free toast
Potato paper!
Next was the ‘Vegetal oyster, potato waffle, and broccoli dip’. Intriguing! The ‘oyster’ play came from a cold green vegetable mixture on one of those thick white spoons that oysters are served on, topped with edible flowers. It was good I just have no idea what it is. The big brown piece of paper was actually the potato waffle, which was mashed potato dehydrated into a cracker. Pretty fun! The broccoli dip was delicious, like a mild broccoli-flavored hummus. I would have loved more of the broccoli dip instead of the unripe avocado opener.
Fried
Dish #2 was one of our favorites, because we love fried things. It was the courgette flower and tofu fritter, with tapenade dressing. It was like a plate of tempura, which no one is going to fight with. The huge block of soft tofu appeared at first to have a disagreeable ratio of fry-to-tofu, but it was really good. The long zucchini flower’s ratio was almost too far in the other direction, with such a delicate vegetable tempurafied. Regardless, both were great and came surrounded with a very necessary and very well-matched olive tapenade. w
Fisssh and chips and vinegarrrr vinegarrr vinegarrr
‘Pickled heritage radish, beetroot and samphire, cauliflower cous cous’ was good but needed some work. I was super excited about samphire, which I’ve recently been introduced to. Given its natural saltiness, it makes sense to pair it with pickled stuff. But it needed something creamy and/or light paired with it. It was a beautiful dish, but altogether was just a little too salty or vinegary. Cauliflower couscous I believe is always a mistake – it’s just ground up raw cauliflower so people can act like they are eating a grain when they think grains are bad. It’s nonsense and it always tastes like nonsense. Here, it did nothing to offset the vinegariness, whereas an actual grain would have provided the necessary counterpart.
Much better than green tea
One of the most impressive parts of the meal was the ‘Wild mushroom tea’. I was hesitant about mushroom flavored tea, but quickly realized that that just means soup. More accurately, broth, and really unbelievably delicious broth. My friend who knows more about MSG that I do said it tasted like MSG (that’s a good thing), because mushrooms are high in glutamates or some such science and these were cooked (brewed) into tea (broth) properly. REALLY incredibly delicious for such a simple thing!
The final savory dish was our big fun main, ‘Artichoke stuffed with veggie chorizo and walnut, summer vegetables, rouille’. Rouille I learned is an olive oil-based garlic, saffron, and chili pepper sauce. This dish was really good, and it needed more of the rouille, not just because I know what it is now but because it was really great. I can always do without whole tomatoes given to me to bite into and 100% of the time burn my tongue because the insides were just cooked and are boiling, but at least they were good tomatoes. I loved the grilled lettuce, which people don’t do enough, and it was so nice to be given a huge artichoke heart with all the work already done of deleafing it. The chorizo was great too. Pretty excellent dish!
Finally, I’m so happy that I chose wisely with the dessert, because mine was soooo good. ‘Coconut and Kaffir lime tapioca with sweet potato’ sounds a little of my beaten path with desserts, but it was one of my favorite things ever. I never really had tapioca pudding before. It’s really good. The coconut and lime combo was mild and lovely, and the little hunks of sweet potato worked well and luckily weren’t candied or anything stupid like that. I want this all the time!
|
|
Grain Store Unleashed was such a fantastic meal! I hope they do something like this again.
GRAIN STORE UNLEASHED AT THE ZETTER HOTEL
Water speed: Really good for London!
Service: Equally good and attentive.
Bathrooms: Oh my the bathrooms. You had to go out sort of towards hotel reception but down a spiral staircase through a few rooms of really…interesting bars. You just spiraled downwards through business people’s conversations and were like don’t mind me just have to pee! Sooo weird. The bathroom door was very heavy.
Food: Really nice overall and I’m so glad I got to go.
Bonus: I learned about glutamates and tapioca.
