Shanghainese food words: saying the dishes, and ordering
Every guide to Shanghai food gives you the characters and the Mandarin. This one gives you the Shanghainese, because in the city that invented these dishes the names have a local pronunciation, and two of them have a local word in them that Mandarin does not use.
Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Shanghainese examples play the recordings from Verbavia’s course, made with a Shanghainese voice; Mandarin examples play a Mandarin voice.
What this page is and is not
It is not a recipe collection and not a restaurant list; there are better ones, and they are easy to find. What none of them has is how the dishes are said in the language of the city they come from. The two best English pages on Shanghai food give characters and Mandarin pinyin and no Wu pronunciation at all, so that is the gap this fills.
One honest caveat before the lists. In a Shanghai restaurant today you will mostly hear Mandarin, and nobody expects a visitor to order in Shanghainese. Read this as the local layer underneath the standard one, rather than as a script.
本帮菜, the city's own cooking
本帮菜 pen paon tshe ‘Shanghai's own cuisine’ is the name for what Shanghai cooks for itself, as against what it cooks for visitors. 本帮 means our own lot, and the four characters used to describe the style are 浓油赤酱 — thick oil and red sauce, meaning a great deal of soy and sugar, cooked down until it glazes.
The taste words you need are short, and they are not the Mandarin ones:
- 甜 die ‘sweet’ — and Shanghai food genuinely is, which surprises people.
- 咸 ghae ‘salty’ · 酸 soe ‘sour’ · 辣 laeh ‘spicy’ · 鲜 sie ‘fresh, savoury’
- 好吃 hau chih ‘delicious’ — literally good to eat, and the highest thing you can say at a table.
- 味道 vi dau ‘flavour’ · 油腻 yeu nyi ‘greasy’ · 新鲜 sin sie ‘fresh’
The dishes, in Shanghainese
| Dish | Shanghainese | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 小笼 | 小笼 siau lon | soup dumplings. Shanghai calls them 小笼馒头, not 小笼包 — see below, because this is the one that tells you where someone is from |
| 生煎 | 生煎 sen tsie | pan-fried pork buns, thicker than a soup dumpling because the dough is leavened |
| 红烧肉 | 红烧肉 ghon sau nyoh | red-braised pork belly, cooked long in soy and sugar. The dish 浓油赤酱 was coined for |
| 腌笃鲜 | 腌笃鲜 ie toh sie | salt pork, fresh pork and bamboo shoot soup — and the name is Shanghainese, see below |
| 排骨年糕 | 排骨年糕 ba kueh nyie kau | a pork chop with rice cakes, the snack Blossoms Shanghai sent the city queueing for |
| 葱油拌面 | 葱油拌面 tshon yeu boe mie | noodles tossed in oil with scallions fried down until they caramelise |
| 烤麸 | 烤麸 khau fu | braised wheat gluten, spongy and sweet, eaten cold at the start of a meal |
| 蟹壳黄 | 蟹壳黄 ha khoh waon | a baked flaky pastry, named for being the colour of a cooked crab shell |
| 八宝饭 | 八宝饭 paeh pau vae | eight-treasure glutinous rice, sweet, served at the end |
| 大闸蟹 | 大闸蟹 da zaeh ha | hairy crab, in season roughly late September to December |
The two words that are actually Shanghainese
Most dish names are ordinary Chinese read with Shanghainese sounds. Two are not, and they are the ones worth knowing.
馒头, not 包子. In most of China a filled steamed bun is a 包子 and 馒头 is the unfilled kind. Shanghai and the Wu-speaking region use 馒头 for both, which is why the dumplings are properly 小笼馒头 and the pan-fried buns are 生煎馒头. Hearing someone say 小笼包 in Shanghai is a small tell that they learned the word somewhere else.
笃, to simmer. The soup 腌笃鲜 ie toh sie ‘salt pork and bamboo shoot soup’ is named with three verbs and adjectives rather than ingredients: 腌 salted, 笃 simmered slowly, 鲜 fresh. The middle one is the Shanghainese word — 笃 toh ‘to simmer slowly’ — and it is the sound of a pot ticking over a low flame. A dish named after a noise is a good dish.
The four heavenly kings of breakfast
四大金刚 sy da cin kaon ‘the four heavenly kings’ is Shanghai's nickname for its classic breakfast, the four things sold together on a street corner:
- 大饼 da pin ‘sesame flatbread’
- 油条 yeu diau ‘fried dough stick’
- 豆浆 deu tsian ‘soy milk’, drunk salty as often as sweet
- 粢饭, a sticky-rice roll — usually wrapped around a 油条
The nickname is recent, from the 1980s, though a Shanghai newspaper was already naming the first three as the city's favourite breakfast in 1936. It is a collective name rather than a set meal: nobody orders all four.
Enough to order
Short sentences, all built from words on the thousand-word list:
| Shanghainese | Meaning | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 菜单 tshe tae | the menu | Ask with 我要看看菜单 or just point |
| 我要搿个。 ngu iau geh gheh. | I'll have this one. | 搿个 is this one — the single most useful phrase in any restaurant |
| 招牌菜 tsau ba tshe | the house speciality | Worth asking for; Shanghai restaurants have strong opinions |
| 我吃素。 ngu chih su. | I'm vegetarian. | 素 is the vegetarian side, 荤 the meat side |
| 几钿？ ci die? | How much? | 钿 is money in Shanghainese, where Mandarin says 钱 |
| 忒贵哉。 theh kue tse. | That's too expensive. | 忒 is too; 哉 closes the sentence |
| 好吃！ hau chih! | Delicious! | Say it to the person who cooked it |
| 我吃好哉。 ngu chih hau tse. | I'm finished. | Literally I've eaten well |
| 结账 cih tsan | the bill | Or 买单 ma tae, which is what most people say |
| 打包 tan pau | to take away | Literally to pack up |
Two more words for the room: 服务员 voh vu yoe ‘waiter’ to call someone over, and 老板 lau pae ‘boss’, which is what you call the owner of a small place and is friendlier than it looks.
How much of this to bother with
If you are visiting for a week, learn 好吃 hau chih ‘delicious’ and 几钿 ci die ‘how much’ and stop. Both are short, both are audibly not Mandarin, and using them at the right moment does more for you than a memorised paragraph.
If you are staying, the food vocabulary is a good place to push further, because it is the part of the language that is still used at home by people who otherwise switch to Mandarin all day. What to say elsewhere in the city is on the phrases page, and the numbers behind every price are on the numbers page.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Shanghai cuisine — Benbang cuisine, and 浓油赤酱
- Chinese Wikipedia: 小笼包 — the Shanghai and Wu use of 馒头 for filled buns, and 南翔小笼馒头
- Chinese Wikipedia: 上海四大金刚 — the term, its 1980s coinage, and the 1936 newspaper reference
- The Woks of Life: Shanghai cuisine — 笃 as the Shanghainese word for simmering slowly, in Yan Du Xian
- Chinese Wikipedia: 蟹壳黄
- Chinese Wikipedia: 响油鳝糊 and 烤麸
- Wikivoyage: Wu phrasebook — ordering, the bill, 我吃素, 忒贵哉
- Shanghai Tourism: Shanghainese cuisine guide — a travel guide in Mandarin pinyin only