Remembering Lemon Chicken

My first taste of New York fine dining was in Shanghai. My Shanghainese sister-in-law told me about a new restaurant like no other. Unusually, it was located on the Bund, Shanghai’s waterfront promenade, a photo spot for tourists from the countryside but not a popular destination for fashionable Shanghainese in 2005. When we entered a gray 1920s office building off a noisy and dusty side street, the foyer unfolded into a glistening pyramid reaching up into the building’s hollowed interior. Exiting the elevator into the restaurant on the fourth floor, vintage parquet floors, bronze walls, and velvet drapes enveloped us in the luxurious decadence of a private club from a century earlier, when the Bund hosted many exclusive clubrooms. The restaurant was the Shanghai branch of Jean-Georges. Two decades later, I best recall the molten chocolate lava cake, a signature of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the celebrity French chef from New York, who opened the restaurant the previous year.The resident head chef was American Eric Johnson, who had cooked for Vongerichten in New York and Paris before moving to Shanghai to manage the new branch. In an interview a few weeks after we dined there, I began to understand the profound transformations such a project entailed. Johnson was training cooks who had never tasted Western cuisine, not even fast food. The challenges of reproducing Vongerichten’s dishes were enormous, but so was the potential, Johnson averred. It was impossible to get good beef, but he marveled at novel ingredients such as a green star anise that he could use for the first time in French cuisine. The service side was even more daunting, he said: training waiters who had never tasted wine, eaten on a white tablecloth, nor sat in such plush velvet chairs. Many practice settings later, the waiters were still visibly nervous. I could only imagine. As a novice diner, I was nervous as well.This encounter was perhaps the one that hooked me on food studies, or more specifically, restaurants as focal points of migration, creative economies, and intercultural contact zones (Farrer 2015). Talking to highly skilled migrant chefs like Johnson and, afterwards, many of the migrant Chinese chefs who worked with them, was not just an introduction to Western cookery into China, it was a story of creating a global dining culinary infrastructure (Pilcher 2018) and transnational careers in gastronomy that connected Shanghai to restaurants in other culinary global cities (Farrer 2019, 2020). It was but one node in a maelstrom of social changes as Shanghai fiercely embraced its role as China’s premier global city (Farrer 2010). It is, however, a fitting place to begin a discussion of how cosmopolitan foodways evolved in this city and what food studies can tell us about China’s fractious relationship to the outside world, especially to America, where I am originally from despite decades in Japan and countless stays in Shanghai.Celebrating twenty-five years of Gastronomica is also a chance for me to reflect on my own journey into food studies and ask where Gastronomica’s cosmopolitan and ever more expansive perspective on foodways might take us in an era when cosmopolitanism seems out of favor in the broader public sphere and even in academia. Under Presidents Trump and Xi, China and America both are turning inward politically, but culinary cosmopolitanism shows surprising resilience in both places, and it remains a useful window onto deeper, and necessary, forms of cultural engagement.My first, much more modest, restaurant meal in Shanghai when I arrived as a graduate student in September 1993 was “lemon chicken,” a dish I never encountered again. In retrospect, lemon chicken was a culinary kōan, a palatal welcome mat that would be extended once, disappearing forever, a paradoxical lesson in seeking belonging in a city that refused to remain familiar. The internet of infinite recipes says that lemon chicken should be Cantonese. Perhaps it is, but I never tasted this dish in Hong Kong either, nor saw it again in Shanghai. Batter-fried and smothered in a syrupy sauce, it seemed so American (or Chinese American), a tastier version of Chicken McNuggets, which would not be available in Shanghai for three years. But in its unapologetic sweetness and cheeky disregard for authenticity, lemon chicken was also very Shanghainese. Like Americans, the Shanghainese love a sweet-savory dish, though usually with a heavy brown soy base. Long before social media, the residents of that restless city also fancied a food fad. I sampled dozens over the next thirty years, from memorable novelties in the 1990s such as sautéed “American bullfrogs,” chewy deep-fried snake, cumin-crusted lamb skewers, and stewed dog meat, to later gastronomic fashions such as Taiwan beef noodles, spicy crayfish, civet poop coffee, duck necks in five spices, all-you-can-eat sushi buffets, rainbow-colored dumplings, and durian ice cream. Some such trends merged into the culinary mainstream; others disappeared into the ether. So, lemon chicken might have been another local food fad, lost in the pre-internet swirl of culinary ephemera. Or it might have been the inspiration of a lone restaurateur appealing to the small trickle of international tourists in 1993. I would gladly revisit it, were it not for the impossibility of truly tasting 1993 Shanghai again.Proustian chicken is not the subject of this essay, but lost times and places are. When I first savored Shanghai, it was a taste of endless promise, a city that we visitors from the West, especially Americans, fell instantly and passionately in love with, and the passion seemed requited. There was nothing that we Americans introduced to the Shanghainese in those years that was not at least picked up and admired, even if quickly discarded (like plump American bullfrogs or the infectious Macarena). In turn, young Westerners fanned out through the city’s low-rise alleyways, devouring baskets of steamed dumplings, raving to Cantopop and the Village People in cavernous smoke-filled discos, and sipping bottles of “Reeb” beer (beer spelled backwards) with their Shanghainese lovers in the dark corners of city parks. The city seemed to embrace us with a passion that would never end, though it would. There was the literally erotic version of this story that became my dissertation about love and sex in Shanghai (Farrer 2002), but the culinary version is what concerns me here. It is about the discovery, and subsequent loss, of that omnivorous Shanghai, at least for me and people like me, and how we can interpret that sense of loss and perhaps reconcile with it.Shanghai’s love affair with foreign foods was less visible in the early 1990s than it would be when I ventured into Jean-Georges a decade later. Western travelers in the early 1990s could sip instant coffee in dark wood-paneled cafés in art deco hotels dating from an era when Shanghai was the epicenter of foreign commerce and imperialism in Asia (1846 to 1949). I sometimes afforded myself this luxury at the Peace Hotel (once the Cathay Hotel) on Shanghai’s Bund, the famous riverfront, near the side street where I had found lemon chicken at a nondescript eatery. Such stately but neglected hotels were for foreign tourists and business travelers. American students and their Chinese partners quaffed bottled beers at short-lived hole-in-the-wall eateries like the Badlands, a Tex-Mex bar on Yan’an Road, and Yellow Submarine Pizza and Sandwiches on Beijing Road, both run by American adventurers who married Chinese women in the early years of China’s “opening and reform.” Such dive bars confused most Shanghainese locals, who found them both expensive and seedy. Appreciation for pricey squalor would require at least a generation of affluence. Forced squalor was too much at hand.Despite the low incomes of most residents, Shanghai in the early 1990s had its own taste for culinary Occidentalism (Farrer 2010). Chinese couples would go on special dates at venerable state-owned Western-style restaurants, such as Red House, Deda Western Restaurant, Donghai Coffee Shop on Nanjing Road, and the Tiane’ge on Huaihai Road. These holdovers from the pre-Communist era had been founded by Europeans and Americans in the period in which Shanghai had been a semi-colonial enclave dominated by foreign powers. The most renowned was the Red House, founded by Louis Rovere, an Italian chef who trained at Shanghai’s Astor House hotel. After meeting and marrying a French woman who was a guest at the hotel, the couple opened a restaurant named Chez Rovere in 1935 near the French Club, gaining fame for baked escargot and mustard-marinated steak. In 1946, they opened a restaurant called Chez Louis Bar on the Avenue du Roi Albert (Shaanxi Road) that was painted bright red, hence its conveniently revolutionary name. A close second was the Deda Western Food Restaurant, which first opened in 1897 in Hongkou as the German restaurant Cosmopolitan, later moving to Sichuan Road in the central city. Deda was known for potato salad, pork chops, and steaks. All such foreign-owned restaurants were expropriated or purchased from their owners in the 1950s and operated as state-owned businesses thereafter. By 1963, just twenty-one Western restaurants remained out of hundreds in the prerevolutionary period (Liao 2014). These remained popular among the cosmopolitan Shanghainese. During the Cultural Revolution (1964–74), a period of fierce anti-Western campaigns, such eateries closed or became workers’ canteens (Swislocki 2009). However, the Red House reopened as a Western restaurant in 1971. Others would reopen after 1978 when China began its period of market reforms and opened up to exchanges with the West. The third famous Western restaurant of the early reform era, the Italian restaurant Tiane’ge (The Swan Pavillon) was opened by a Shanghainese couple in 1950 and patronized by Shanghai’s literati through the early 1960s. Diners in the early 1990s still could enjoy its signature dish of “cream of chicken noodles” (naiyoujisijumian) before it fell victim to urban redevelopment later in that decade (Sina 2012; Kankan Xinwen 2017).The two most famous Western restaurants, Red House and Deda, still operated in new venues and updated guises in 2025. Even writing this sentence feels strange. So little remains of the grungy human-scale Shanghai of the 1990s, and those fragments that do remain all seem out of place among the glittering high-rise towers. In the early 1990s, these restaurants were still stylish. They served dishes now called “laoshi xican” (literally old-style Western food), but at the time were just “xican” (Western food), or among Shanghai locals, “dacai” (literally “big dishes”). According to Lynn Pan, a leading local scholar of Shanghai culture, the term dacai referred to the size of the plates upon which Western food was served in the prewar period, since Chinese dishes (cai) had always been served in bowls of smaller diameter.1 Such dishes were still well-represented in Shanghai foodways in the 1990s, both in home cooking and in restaurant offerings. These included Shanghai household staples such as “Russian soup” (luosongtang), an interpretation of borscht based on tomatoes, potatoes and cabbage, potato salad (tudosela, made with mayonnaise and canned luncheon meat), fried pork cutlet (zhazhupai, a type of schnitzel), and curry chicken (galiji, chicken on the bone stewed in a sauce made with curry powder). Standard preparations included oven baking (ju, only in restaurants, since households lacked ovens) and “red braising” (honghui). Imports were substituted with local alternatives. The recipe for “red braised” beef replaced the red wine with Shanghai Worcestershire sauce (lajiangyou) and tomato paste, while the recipe for cheese noodles replaced Italian pasta with locally available Chinese noodles. Distinctive features of Shanghai dacai include the liberal use of mayonnaise, white sauce (baizhi, or béchamel sauce), and lajiangyou as a flavoring both during and after cooking (Farrer 2014).Other dishes were associated with famous restaurants and cafes: Donghai Coffee Shop’s “Portuguese chicken” (puguoji: a modified Macanese dish of curried baked chicken in white sauce), the Swan Pavillion’s “cheese noodles” (qishimian: a baked dish of Chinese noodles and cheese sauce), the Red House’s oxtail and and a of (Farrer 2014). first such foods a of culinary from the from a type of to who reopened a version of Swan in they can more be as a (Swislocki As by in in the term both a culinary associated with the city’s Western and a in its cosmopolitan from the of China, both of which were by and Such restaurants a Shanghainese version of culinary as to a Chinese and of culinary that was also at the from other at can also be a of (or more the 1990s, however, young Shanghainese quickly lost in such Western restaurants, with their of and early In those years of “opening it was the of American fast food that to Western to Shanghai’s opened its first branch in Shanghai in and arrived in In the 1990s, a at was a more fashionable than one at the Red House or As incomes Western-style fast foods especially to Western also their and into the of urban a in foreign a new public of Western fine dining with restaurants in the that only business travelers and could In a French on the was the first fine dining Western to outside a hotel. restaurateur who a restaurant in Hong a pricey French in an 1920s building on Shanghai’s but waterfront promenade, known as the onto the over the of on the of the to a of Western in the a who cosmopolitan dining trends during the first decade of the a of redevelopment the In a and named opened next to in another 1920s office building that was and the of the by star Bund most the first by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, restaurant in New York subsequent in and had made a market in the transnational business of (Farrer and There was a to Chinese restaurants of service and culinary would In this Western seemed to be Chinese fine dining than the other a of the early century years after the popular culinary restaurants, of which were as Western restaurants, French restaurants and Italian (Farrer 2014). the end, one could at by where a of only would be to a to a of by a of and all to a to the on the The included such as an of in a and in a Diners the in while a of them on When opened in the meal with twenty-five chefs and waiters (Farrer 2014). 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