Christmas Dinner: Elements Fresh / Great Vegetarian

December 26, 2014
reco Notebook
2014 Shanghai Biennale

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This article was translated from Chinese by AI.

On the evening of the 24th, we had a wine-paired dinner for two at Elements Fresh. It’s rare to have such a formal meal here; usually, I just order one main dish and a glass of juice, treating it like a light meal. The set dinner for two is a three-course affair: two appetizers, two main courses, and two desserts, with each course paired with a glass of wine—totaling three glasses per person. The flavors were quite excellent, and the wine pairings were also pretty good. Aside from the red wine served with the lamb chops and the champagne with dessert, everything else was paired with white wine.

Vietnamese Fresh Shrimp and Mango Spring Rolls

Baked Cheese and Crab Cake

Pomegranate Roasted Lamb Chops

Grilled Salmon Salad

On the evening of the 25th, we dined at Great Vegetarian, a very famous vegetarian restaurant in Shanghai. The ambiance, service, and dishes are all excellent. However, purely from the perspective of eating vegetarian, as someone who can eat meat normally, there really isn’t much point in visiting a place that makes vegetarian food taste like meat… It doesn’t provide the satisfaction of eating meat, yet you still feel the guilt of consuming fried foods. Moreover, their prices are honestly no cheaper than meat dishes… perhaps even higher…

The ‘Gu Lu Gu Lu’ dish looks remarkably like Sweet and Sour Pork with Pineapple. If I hadn’t eaten it at a vegetarian restaurant, I would have sworn it was made of meat~~

Gu Lu Gu Lu (Sweet and Sour Mock Pork)

Fried Tofu Skin Cutlet: This looks incredibly similar to Japanese Tonkatsu, but when you bite into it, it’s just tofu… ~~

Fried Tofu Skin Cutlet

‘Chen Mapo Wears New Clothes’: A take on Mapo Tofu, but the tofu is deep-fried first. The flavor didn’t penetrate the inside, so the taste was just average..

Chen Mapo Wears New Clothes

‘Double Winter’: A Shanghai-style dish featuring shiitake mushrooms and winter bamboo shoots. The taste is good, but it’s clearly not worth the price…