Nici Wickes gets a Shanghai surprise

Nici Wickes in Shanghai. Photo Martha Jeffries/Brendan Withy

From street food to show-stoppers, dining out in one of China's biggest cities is nothing short of spectacular.

I'd seen China but never actually set foot in the vast country itself until this year. How so?

On a flight from Hong Kong to Frankfurt a few years ago, the inflight monitor informed me we were jetting our way across China. I began tracking our progress and, looking out of the window, became fascinated as this caramel-coloured land passed beneath us. On and on it went, a seemingly never-ending landscape of beige, interrupted every so often by the faint vein of a river or a cloud of smoke from some invisible flame. I recall it so vividly because the four or five hours it took to fly over China seemed to take forever.

Fast forward two years and there I was, touching down at Pudong International Airport, the gateway to Shanghai. I was part of a TV crew of four, there to film the new series of my television show World Kitchen, and we had barely four days to capture the essence of the cuisine of this staggering, sprawling icon of the Orient.

Adding an edge to our arrival was the fact that as a camera crew, we were keen to make it clear that the only thing we were interested in was Shanghai's cuisine, and we posed no threat to the regime. Luckily our exhausted, bedraggled appearance must have helped our cause and before we knew it, the formalities of immigration were over and we were outside squinting into the grey gloom of a Shanghai sunrise.

As a crew, whenever we arrive in a new place we're torn between being greedy to get the lay of the land as soon as possible and needing to pay heed to the fact we're likely to be facing long days of filming so a wee rest might be a good idea. But sitting down to eat qualifies as resting doesn't it? Luckily we were all in agreement so after checking in, we got a taxi to drop us into the centre of Shanghai in search of some eats.

That first taxi ride is etched into my mind. Even knowing that the city has a population of more than 23 million people and is one of the world's most dynamic cities, nothing can prepare you for Shanghai. Nowhere have I ever seen such a crazy and incredible arrangement of gravity-defying skyscrapers as in the Pudong district of Shanghai. Colourful (one of them is lipstick pink!) and gleaming by day, dazzling, strobing and flashing like a dashboard on acid at night, they are a show of Shanghai's brashness, wealth, commitment to progress and its obsession for anything new. As soon as the construction on one building is complete, the towering cranes are moved on to begin another that will endeavour to better all those around it.

However, with all this at your back, you can look across the busy waterway that bisects the city, and it's as though you've been transported back in time to when Shanghai was known as the "Paris of the East". Here the architecture is a reminder of the decadence and debauchery of old Shanghai with ornate stone buildings lining up along The Bund and the web of narrow, shabby alleyways that make up the Old Town. My head was spinning and my eyes were popping with the contrast. I needed to eat.

We headed to the ramshackle part of town, of course, where all the best street food is found. From that moment on, our days were filled with the marvellous, the strange, the downright fastest food I'd ever experienced. I wholeheartedly recommend straying from the main roads and larger eateries. On our first day we did just that (okay, so maybe we were lost) and we ended up being ushered from a street stall to an upstairs dining room that felt like we'd entered a John Malkovich movie, so low was the ceiling.

Tucking into stir-fried greens, braised chicken, some very fishy dried prawns with okra and garlic and the ubiquitous bowl of rice, we were the sole Westerners in a sea of silent, Chinese labourers who seemed to find our presence a novel break in their day. Sustained we headed off to explore further. Still keen to stave off jet lag we spied a local massage room that looked like just the ticket to soothe us. However, we were forgetting that the reverence with which we Westerners tend to approach Eastern traditions - calming music, candles, blissful aromatherapy - is rarely mirrored in the country of origin.

On entering the makeshift parlour, we were all a moment too late clocking the fierce fluorescent lighting, tired towels and soap opera shouting from the TV and before we knew it, we'd been pushed into cracked vinyl chairs, our feet left to soak in tubs of warm water. Escape was impossible. The lead female masseuse entertained us for the entire hour we were there by holding a "monversation" (that's a one-way conversation, folks) with all four of us simultaneously - in Mandarin. Our collective greeting of "ni hao" must have been convincingly delivered! The more we giggled at the absurd scene, the more she talked. We stumbled out of there on to the street knowing the meaning of the expression to be "Shanghai'd"!

Over the next few days we discovered a city that was as fascinating for what we could find as it was for what we couldn't. Forget fortune cookies, lemon chicken or deep-fried ice cream balls, we were to find myriad taste and texture sensations like we'd never imagined.

We found a great little street of eats by Yu Garden that was so diverse we returned often to sample different snacks, some of which I adored and some not so much, it's fair to say. When travelling, I have a theory that when you see a line of locals by a street stall or a busy restaurant, you have to wonder if they know something you don't. In the case of the soup dumplings, it was a proven theory - the line extended way out on to the street and once we'd figured out we needed a ticket first, platefuls of freshly folded and steamed dumplings began arriving at our table and we began feasting on what were the most incredible morsels of comfort food - moist, packed full of pork and prawn and with a hot broth captured in the parcel that was just heavenly.

But this way of sussing out local food isn't foolproof, by any means. You run the risk of discovering just who the foreigner is and how local tastes can differ hugely from your own. Stinky tofu anyone? I love a stinky cheese but this stuff seemed beyond the pale to me while the locals were gobbling it back with glee. One dish we were all in agreement on was a gutsy flavourful bowl of freshly pulled noodles in broth. There was such variety that every meal was an adventure. Specialist carts and food stalls hawking roasted sweet potatoes, skewered squid, grilled chicken, steamed buns, shallot pancakes and more are all common sights, such is the influence from the surrounding regions on Shanghainese cuisine.

When it comes to high-end restaurants and bars, Shanghai shines with choice. One of those we found was the Art Salon, in the leafy neighbourhood of the French Concession. With its off-beat elegance, dripping chandeliers, mismatched furniture and kitschy artwork it suggested to me of what the opulent days of old must have been like when silk-clad socialites frequented small, cosy salons to while away the evening with sumptuous food and titillating company. Here we ate dishes of freshwater shrimp sauted with gingko nuts and a chicken dish that can only be described as a piece of theatre, arriving as it did complete with dry ice, a model boat and feathered arrows. Most importantly, it tasted sensational. Slightly sweet, in the Shanghai tradition, but with a kick of chilli and the fresh flavour of spring onions.

If I was to look for common traits in Shanghai's cuisine it would be that fast cooking is often the order of the day, with only the freshest of ingredients meticulously prepared before being steamed or fast-fried; slower "cooking" practices are more likely to involve pickling or preserving. I can recommend the thousand-year-old eggs if you're feeling adventurous - smoky and sulphuric but delicious if you can get past eating something so devilishly black.

Bars housed in the gracious old buildings on the Bund are the perfect place to spend an evening, sipping cocktails and cold beer while admiring the breathtaking view across the Huangpu River. There's shopping (of course), peaceful parks, massive sculptures which dot the cityscape and ancient temples that sit splendidly among modern high-rises. Shanghai is anything but beige. It is exhilarating and exciting, a mix of sci-fi and antique, frenetic yet orderly. We had explored what felt like a tiny pocket of it, as it seemed to reach out and up endlessly.

* Watch World Kitchen, where Nici travels the world finding great recipes to cook at home. Sundays at 5.30pm on TV3. This Sunday, July 24: Shanghai.