In the middle of September it was our Wedding Anniversary.  It was 25 years ago that I got married, dressed in scarlet, at Great Malvern Register Office and the following day we had a Service of Blessing at Great Malvern Priory with us dressed in our traditional wedding gear.  As we had a double-dip wedding we are never really sure which day is our Wedding Anniversary so we tend to celebrate on the second day, rather than the first.  I have no photos of our wedding here, they are all packed away in storage in Kent, but a Facebook friend sent through a photo of us all those years ago: a very special act of kindness.  Here we are sitting on the steps at the back of my parents’ house on the far-reaching steps that my mother designed, known in the family as the stairway to heaven.  Even in our late 20s/early 30s we looked quite young. And both of us had more hair. Time and experience has taken its toll.  But anyway 25 years of walking through life together needs celebrating.

So a little over a year ago I was planning a sort of remake of our honeymoon to celebrate.  As part of our honeymoon had involved travelling on the Orient Express to Venice I thought it would be a good idea to travel on the train again, going further east this time, to the train’s original destination of Istanbul.  But instead, in the meantime, we have travelled a little bit further east and a little sooner than I had bargained for. So what did we do to celebrate instead?

Well, we went a little further east than here to celebrate on The Bund, with its view of Pudong which was all lit up, as usual, with the Oriental Pearl Tower doing its nighttime chameleon act.  And if you haven’t worked it out by now, it had to be about food.

How could it not be?  I’m married to the man whose notion of selling me the idea of moving out to Shanghai was encapsulated in the sentence  “Just think that’s 52 weekends of new food experiences”.

So we went and had a new food experience at Mr and Mrs Bund.  The chef in charge of this establishment is Paul Pairet, who also has an experimental molecular gastronomy restaurant Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet (he was originally a chemist) at a secret location elsewhere in the city.  Ultraviolet with its single table for 10 and its 20-course avant-garde

Mr and Mrs Bund

set menu for all the senses with Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck type-food might be for another day – if one could raise the £250/head price and be in a position to book your table 3 months in advance.

So we settled instead for the eatery of more equitable proportions, Mr and Mrs Bund.  Here Paul Pairet follows the trend of many high-end and not so high-end restaurants in the city which like to have their restaurants dark. Sometimes the tables themselves

Making sure the menu was in the light

Richard trying to figure out how to place our order

are spotlighted, sometimes they are not, but it does make me wonder what have they got to hide and this somehow reminded me of doing my school prep by candlelight during Britain’s three-day week.  Candlelight is romantic, keeping a room dark and then shining bright down-lights onto your table, but not lighting your loved-one’s face is not.

We ordered a couple of drinks to start I had a gin and tonic and Richard had a campari-based cocktail.

The menu came in large format, but once we had been given the books we were then given a tablet to order our food, which wasn’t much help as we couldn’t read the Chinese.  This seemed odd to me – perhaps it was trying to be ultra-modern, but for me it gave me the feel of a hamburger joint.  We went with one of their set menus to share in the end.

Bread

Tuna Mousse with Fennel Toasts

The food when it arrived, however, did not disappoint. We started with an off-menu item which arrived in an unmarked pull-top tin together with

Iberico de Bellota

Oysters

Fennel Toasts. Opening the tin revealed a light and very tasty Tuna mousse.  Next came slices of  Iberico de Bellota – fine free-range aged Spanish ham from bellota (acorn-fed) pata negra (black-hoofed) pigs which

Plancha of “Dover Sole”

roam on the border between Spain and Portugal.  This was followed by some oysters served with lemons, chopped shallots, a very mild vinegar and a balsamic vinegar.  Next came a grilled fish- Plancha of Dover Sole –  a fish supposedly from our own neck of the woods, claiming that was Dover Sole (Solea solaea) from the true Sole family, but we had very strong suspicions that it hadn’t come from 15 – 35 miles from Fordwich.  In fact it was probably Microstomus pacificus the (Pacific Dover Sole aka the Slime sole or Slippery sole) a member of the flounder family, and not a true Sole at all – its range extends from Baja California to the Bering Sea, and somewhat resembles the Dover Sole.  Wikipedia has more to say on the subject: Because of its prestige, the name “Dover sole” was borrowed to name the eastern Pacific species Microstomus pacificus, a quite distinct species with different culinary properties: the Pacific sole has thinner, less firm fillets and sells for a lower price. (But not in one of Shanghai’s top-end restaurants).

Chateaubriand

Béarnaise Sauce & Herb Salad

Desserts

Next we had Chateaubriand Béarnaise served with a herb salad, a fricassé of ceps and the sauce  – essentially a hollandaise sauce flavoured with tarragon.

For dessert Richard chose the strawberry dish with fresh strawberries, a strawberry broth and a granité with lime and sugar, whilst I was greedy and went for the Mousse au Chocolat, which came with a chocolate sorbet, as well as rum and hazelnuts.

With our food we had a Riesling-Gewuztraminer from Josmeyer in France’s Alsace  – a grower we know well and have visited his vineyard personally, although many, many years ago, a Petaluma Riesling from The Clare Valley in Australia and a Louis Latour Chablis from Burgundy.  The wine glasses from which we drank each came complete with wax-paper disks slotted around their stems, which although novel and informative, telling us exactly what we were drinking, was I think, a rather tacky gesture.

We thought it was a lovely meal and an excellent way to celebrate our 25 years of marriage. We had dressed up for the experience in our smart casual clothes, as we thought, as we always do that being given such an experience by hard-working and creative chefs and their teams needs to respect, just as you would dress up for the theatre.  Dress is not as formal here as it would be in the UK – I can get away with wearing trousers and a smart top anywhere. For me though, a T-shirt and a baseball cap didn’t real cut the mustard (what on earth is the origin of that phrase, I wonder?)  However it was obvious that some of the other guests did not think the same way as us.