Results tagged “wujianglu”

For a bustling Chinese city, Shanghai has a pretty pitiful night market in the form of Wujianglu (especially when compared to Hong Kong and Taiwan). Now, the Shanghai government is thinking of overhauling the market right before the World Expo.

The demise of the stalls and vendors on the eastern portion of Wujiang Lu has been rumored for a few months now. While the modernization of the popular food street might very well come to fruition in 2009, it's apparent that Yang's fried dumplings (小杨生煎) will maintain its Wujiang Lu roots for quite a while longer.

So you're walking down that much talked about half of Wujiang Lu that has been torn down and built back up as a blandclean and modern commercial pedestrian street. You notice this section between Shimen Lu and Maoming Lu is bookended by a Costa Coffee on one end and a Starbucks on the other. A Coffee Bean is located in between, just in case you simply do not have enough time to reach the other two places for your emergency corporate caffeine fix. You notice the more homegrown Il Panino has reserved a spot here, and regional chains Awfully Chocolate and Honeymoon Dessert have taken root as well.

While we at Shanghaiist will undoubtedly be half-comatose after a night of liver bashing, if past experience be anything to go by, on 21st July Harry Potter enthusiasts will be lining up in the hordes to await the arrival of the seventh and last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. At 7 am on the dot (yawn, yawn) the long-awaited story will go on-sale at stores worldwide, including a handful in our locality (sorry, English only for the time being).

Shanghaiist contributor Micah has posted some information about the present and future of Wujiang Lu in the comments section of our post from yesterday. We thought they were worth highlighting.

We received this email today from a friend (and frequent eater of shengjian mantou):

Shanghaiist was taking a look at some of 2dog's photos when we noticed a picture of a strange confection that's been nicknamed the "Chinese pizza". Some of you have probably already seen stores and street vendors selling these things for about 3 yuan apiece. Apparently it's caught on big in Beijing and other big cities. The provenance of this "pizza" is supposedly from one of China's ethnic minorities, known as the Tujia (土家族) minority, who mostly hail from Hubei province. According to this article, in May of the last year the first Tujia pizza (土家烧饼/掉渣饼) franchise opened up in Hubei's provincial capital, Wuhan. In the next eight months franchises spread all over China -- costs of franchising vary from 3,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan, though this article claimed that you could open one up in Shanghai for a 30,000 franchising fee. We won't tell you much about the taste -- we haven't had one yet -- but evidently it's popular with people looking for a quick kebab type meal on the go, which means it might also be good for the post-shitfaced munchies, if they're open that late. It costs a mere .62 yuan to make one of these, and yet they are sold to the unsuspecting public at a huge markup -- 3 yuan!

The residents of Shanghaiist's apartment building, especially those with hammers and drills, wake up at 5 a.m. on most Saturday mornings. But we're assuming this past weekend they all did so to stand in line to buy the English version of the new Harry Potter book -- everyone else in the friggin' world did.