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Shanghai, China: Amazing Vegan Food, Plus My Favorite Buffet Ever

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Honestly, if you ask me about Shanghai’s food or what I ate, my very first thought is, “When can I go back?” I didn’t even scratch the surface of what there is on offer for vegans, but what I tried was incredible. 
Oh, and if you came here from the previous post just to find out what toon bags are, that’s at the last section, but why would you want to skip all this food before that? Do you SEE how delicious it is? I mean you can’t see deliciousness but just look how good. Dammit I love Shanghai’s food! 

 Shanghai is famous for a few specific dishes, like xiaolongbao, the famous soupy dumplings (apparently, not to be confused with ‘soup dumplings’ which are a different kind of dumpling filled with soup? It’s all very specific but hey, they are still soup dumplings to me).  Unfortunately, I have not been able to find vegan version of soup dumplings (hit me up if you know where to go!) anywhere in the world, and I didn’t find them in Shanghai, but I did find a lotttt of other buns and dumplings so I was happy. As you know from my Beijing food post, I really like dumplings. And I shared my first meal in Shanghai in the first Shanghai post, because it was a food court salad (RG though!) at the Shanghai Tower. Today we are going to talk about the other three meals I had in Shanghai, at amazing vegetarian restaurants that I want to go to again and again and try everything at because they were phenomenal. I’m kind of surprised that I don’t have more food to share but it was super hot and I think I just ate a lot of fruit while there. China has incredible fruit! Also, a lot of bubble tea.

Speaking of, before we get to the food: 

Guys, I mean, I’ve had bubble tea before, many times. I’ve always thought it was kind of whatever, sweetened tea which I don’t like with weird tapioca balls at the bottom that are just super weird. But apparently, bubble tea in China has done what olives did in Portugal – completely changed my view on them and tastebuds and just did a complete brain reversal because now I love both. In Portugal, I grew to love olives because a lot of the time they were literally the only food (and bread) that a town had for me! But here, I’m just like, immediately obsessed with bubble tea. I crave those little bubbles SO hard. 
After the acrobatics show we saw in our favorite place in Shanghai, Expat Centre (not its real name), we found this cafe called Pure & Whole, a small chain in Shanghai of ‘clean’ healthy food with vegan options clearly marked. Now normally I would wholeheartedly boycott any place or any person describing food and not underwear as ‘clean’, but I can’t afford to have all the morals when traveling. Also I can chalk it up to a langauge barrier? Or just the message about that kind of judgmental bullshit hasn’t reached China yet. But I admit I had to get food here, because they had big salads, great looking salads the likes of which I hadn’t seen since Moscow. So, considering we had already eaten dinner but the following day was a travel day, I got an amazing salad and an order of quinoa balls to go. Hehe balls. The quinoa patties were mixed with onion, kale, garlic, mung bean, whole grain breadcrumbs, and spices. Haha I copied that from the menu. The salad, hoo boy it was WONDERFUL sounding. I got the Popeye, which was spinach, mung beans, lentils, cooked spinach, edamame, hen of the woods mushrooms, broccoli, coconut bacon, scallions, wakame, avocado, and miso dressing. I MEAN. Could you BE any more perfect for me? It had lentils! Avocado! Want to hear it become even more perfect? They said they had run out of spinach, and I said “is there another green to substitute?” They said they had kale. I think they were concerned at how happy that made me.

Because they were takeout containered, the pictures are even less appetizing than my usual ones, and I cannot in good faith share what they looked like outside the restaurant’s preferred plating ideals. You don’t want to see what the beige quinoa fritters looked like in their beige container in the beige-ifying light of our hotel room the next day. Nor do you want to see the salad stuffed into a container that was just too small for its grand size. Both were very good though, and I would love to eat at P&W and try other things. They had a great sounding menu, and I really enjoyed the things I got. They also sent a packet of pita bread in my to-go bag! I guess it came with the patties or the salad, which is awesome. Yippee for bread (so rare in China! I haven’t had bread in so long because most of the bread here is eggy or milky)! 

Okay, onto the more important stuff, our two spectacular dinners. First, we went to a fancy (we didn’t know it would be fancy!) vegetarian restaurant with wonderful reviews called Vegetarian Life Style. I like that the front says life style as two different words because I like to think they mean vegetarian life AND vegetarian style, because we are so stylish. I mean just check out the style section of this blog which I literally have not updated in four years lolol. Maybe I will do that soon and write about my extraordinarily unfashionable travel clothes. ANYWAY, the restaurant. It was PACKED and in a very swanky neighborhood, JiangNing, so that was great to see. We weren’t as hungry as we usually are so we didn’t order as much as we usually do, which is a DAMN DIRTY SHAME. 

Why such a shame? Because the food may have been the best actual quality we had so far in China. Every dish was superb. I’ve loved most of the vegan food we’ve found so far even if it wasn’t exactly exceptional but these dishes really were. As always, we first needed a green vegetable, and I got this broccoli stem looking jawn that wasn’t broccoli but some kind of chinese cabbage I don’t know it was so well done and came with an incredible mushroom mix with more green stems. I love green stems almost as much as green leaves, and they are better than leaves when cooked!  
Then we got this super spicy tofu dish that was mixed with lots and lots of chilis, celery, mung beans, bean sprouts, and cauliflower, and it came in an ON-FIRE cauldron. Seriously, the dish came over a gas burner, aflame, that did NOT go out ever! When we finished eating it was still going and was starting to be scary so a guy came over and extinguished it when we asked. But because of that eternal flame, the dish stayed PIPING hot, which was really funny but like, I needed it to cool off! Luckily it was, like I said, delicious. 
Lastly, we got probably my favorite noodle dish so far in China, a spinach noodle bowl topped with bok choy and a spicy chopped tofu mixture. It was so flipping great. I would like to have this now please. 
If/when I go back to Shanghai, Vegetarian Life & Style Magazine may very well be my first stop. 

Well, maybe my second stop. 

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THIRD FLOOR, YO. THIRD FLOOR
The Jen Dow vegetarian buffet is without a doubt my favorite buffet in the world. Inside the Jing’ian Temple complex not too far from Expat Centre, Jen Dow is this big building above filled with vegetarian dining. The first floor is a casual cafeteria full of locals, plus a vegetarian bakery (I doubt anything is vegan). The second floor is a restaurant with Chinese and Western menus. The fourth floor is a more expensive version of the second floor, with Chinese and Western menus PLUS VIP rooms, whatever that means. But the third floor, guys. The third floor is WHERE IT’S AT. That’s the vegetarian buffet, an all-you-can-eat extravaganza that we read in advance was quite expensive for China (about $35 USD, which is our most expensive meal yet), but that the food was really good. We figured it’s worth a try, and even if it’s so expensive at least you can eat all you can! 

I was not prepared for how beautiful everything about this place was. It was so fancy (we were, again, not dressed appropriately for our tastes but a) no one cared and b) we don’t have nice clothes on us). And the buffet went on FOR MILES. I have never seen such an enormous, gorgeous buffet. Everything was clearly marked with what had egg and what had milk (most of the desserts, which I expected, but not much of the actual food!). I have never eaten so much in my life but still wanted more. Everything was at least good, most things were great, and some was spectacular. Because it’s a ginormous buffet with literally 540030 different dishes, I have no idea what I ate and what’s in these pictures I’m about to send your way, but know that it was wonderful and I can’t wait to go back. 

​I know you’re like JESUS did you just share every picture you took? Hell I didn’t even share all my pictures of the DISPLAY. It kept going. An hour in I asked Z what he was eating because I hadn’t seen it and we realized that I had missed the lineup along one ENTIRE WALL. And guess what was over on that wall, guys? THE TOON BAGS! Teased in the previous post. 
​They were really fun and yummy! Everything was. I had soo much mock meat, all of it epic. So many great vegetable dishes. I tried stinky tofu for the first time – it is stinky! Why do people eat it! I had so many dumplings and steamed fluffy buns and amazing noodle dishes. There were endless arrays of juices and ‘enzyme’ shots which were like vinegary juices (like shrubs!). All of it was incredible. 
I really need to return here. FFS, there were entire SECTIONS I didn’t even enter! This hot area had a make your own noodle bar (I KNOW) and a make your own hotpot bar (I KNOW!) but there was just too much food and we couldn’t try everything, no matter how hard we tried. It was epic. I highly recommend the Jen Dow buffet if you are in Shanghai. And please take me with you. 
So, after our China journey began with amazing food in Beijing, we continued to be impressed and blown away in Shanghai. After we left these big cities, the quality would decrease as is expected, but we are still eating pretty darn well. Stay tuned! 
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