There goes my summer diet - according to Smart Shanghai, Carls Jr., the burger chain we went gaga for when its first location started serving artery clogging goodness in People's Square, will now have a second shop in the Wujiang Lu food mall. more ›

Let's all pour one out to our favorite little food street, which was cleaned up and moved into a shiny, but lifeless, food mall right next door sometime late last year. Today, the bulldozers came in and tore it down for good. The picture to the right is by NPR China correspondent Louisa Lim, who was there on the scene to witness the end to what once was known as Love Lane. more ›

Paul French is the author of Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium War to Mao. He is currently re-investigating the unsolved case of Pamela Werner, a young English girl horrifically murdered in Peking in 1937, to be published as Murder in Peking by Penguin Books. Today, he writes about some historic buildings we lost in 2009 thanks to thoughtless Shanghai development. more ›

We checked out the Krispy Kreme grand opening today on Wujiang Lu, intending to take a few pictures and bite into a few donuts. No dice on the latter, as we were met on this rainy day with an annoyingly long queue of people waiting to get into the store for some donut giveaways. Judging from the huge LCD screen and the confetti and the Jason Mraz blaring from the speakers, we figured we missed out on a pretty ridiculous party. But hey, Jason Mraz and sweet donuts sure seemed to be a winning combination for the smiling Shanghai ayi's we saw leaving the store. Or it may just be free food that does the trick. more ›

We're not exactly sure what it is about this winter that's causing a sudden spate of closings - is it just a terrible coincidence? - but several well-known institutions around the city are shuttering or have shuttered their doors. Sometime recently, costumed restaurant ICONs was cleaned out and replaced with a nightclub called Ming. Then we were hit by news that The Uighur Restaurant (on 1 Shaan Xi Nan Lu) had closed, to the dismay of everybody who loved joining in a Xinjiang conga line halfway through your meal.And then went City Diner and the adjoining seedy bar M-Zone on Tongren Lu last week, according to a tipster. more ›

Looks like Shanghai’s Year of Pho will soon have its first cage match. Yes, our pleas for decent pho through the years have been thoroughly drowned out by the sound of so many pho restaurants popping up left and right, front and back. But something intriguing is happening on Wujiang Lu, where Pho Sizzlin’ has, up until now, laid claim to its pho-main with is colorful personality but decidedly average noodle offerings. A challenger has set up shop on the same street, and Pho26 is no glass-jawed pretender. more ›

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. more ›

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. more ›

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. more ›

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). more ›

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. more ›

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

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! more ›

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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. more ›