The three-story Shanghai Quanjude we visited was located right off the highway, inside the lobby of a
hotel. Our party of 65 was hustled past a 3-foot high plastic duck statue at the entrance and upstairs to a private banquet room. Food began arriving immediately.

My camera was on the fritz that day (stupid rechargeable batteries), but I managed to photograph some dishes. Among the appetizers: Cold lotus root drizzled with sweet syrup. Also set on the table for warm-up was hard-boiled duck
eggs.

In the background you see a chopped cai (vegetable) with garlic, and beyond that an
unrecognizable bowl of glop. For some reason, we found Thousand Island salad dressing to be immensely popular at our banquets. The waiters would dump loads of it all over a perfectly nice bowl of cut-up, fresh salad greens. I was NOT a fan.

Then it was time for duck. Several men, sporting surgical masks and wielding sharp knives, dramatically wheeled their carving carts into the center of the
room.

Platters of carved meat and skin were dispatched to each table, along with bamboo steamers brimming with pancakes. Waitresses set about demonstrating the assembly process, which I already knew, but watched intently.

They darted about, reaching around our shoulders to dip the dark, moist meat in tangy, thick sauce, and smearing the sauce around the inside the pancake. Some of the meat was still attached to its glistening, salty, fatty skin. Fresh sprigs of scallions were also baptized in the sauce, which acted as an adhesive to hold the pancake package together. These pancakes were fabulous.

One of the Shanghai-based group coordinators told me there are three ways to properly eat duck, according to the Quanjude tradition. The first way is to eat the skin alone (no problem here), the second incorporates the pancakes, and the third involves making a soup of the leftover meat and bones. The soup was deposited at our table after the pancakes were consumed. It was a rich soup, with just a few spare leafy greens floating luxuriantly in the broth.

A few other dishes were brought out — somewhat unremarkable and unnecessary, I think. What I enjoyed was the accompaniment to the standard dessert platter of watermelon (yuck) and honey dew melon (double yuck) — baby duck pastries!
These cuties were made of a somewhat flat puff pastry-like dough and filled with a dense, sweet bean paste. Like many Chinese desserts, sweet was not THAT sweet.

This was my first dinner in Shanghai. Having grown up accustomed to the big banquet-lazy-susan-more-food-than-you-can-eat-red-and-gold-decor meals, I was somewhat less blown away with the overall experience than some of my colleagues. But, the food was certainly something to write home about — I'd never had duck this good.

Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant
786 Huai Hai Zhong Road (via Rui Jin Road)
Shanghai, 200003 China