Mr Harry’s is a strange place.  On the West Nanjing Road, more or less on top of Marks and Spencer’s is a British Restaurant.  It is decorated with Union Jacks and knick-knacks you might find in a charity shop back home.  There are piles of board games you can take out to play and when I was there one afternoon grabbing something to eat there was a group of people playing bridge;  most of them were elderly i.e. much older than me – what are they doing in Shanghai?  In theory you can’t get a work permit beyond the age of 60, unless you can prove that your job cannot be done by a local Chinese person.  Were they married to Chinese people?  Were they visiting expat relatives and taken refuge from the mayhem that is Shanghai in this bastion of Britishness?  Did they have much younger spouses that were working (you can’t get a visa for a non-working person unless you are married to a worker with a work permit, unless you come into the country as, say, a student).  I didn’t ask – I was on my way to a meeting about a trip abroad I was making with the SEA, but I did wonder.

We have visited Mr Harry’s a couple of other times.  It is not our destination of choice – I think both of us think that you would have to be feeling really homesick to resort to spending your life in the city here – there is so much else to explore and do; why would you want to recreate your home life (badly) whilst you are here.  The first time we went Richard had fish and chips and decided that they must have sourced their cod from the Marks and Spencer’s store downstairs.  When he tried to confirm it with the owner he got a non-committal response – what it is to be married to someone who knows their food so well, that they can identify the source of the cod they are eating.  We were there because he wanted to understand what was being sold in Shanghai for British expats to eat.  We’ve also eaten in the Marks and Spencer in-store cafe – unfortunately their service level is not up to the standards of their UK stores.

The second time we went was for Burn’s Night celebrations.  Mr Harry’s held Burn’s Night on the Saturday this year, two days before the usual night.  We usually make a big deal of Burn’s Night at home, not because of Richard’s Scottish roots (and my very, very distant ones), but because 25th January is our son’s birthday and he loves haggis.  He doesn’t like cake, never has, unless it is homemade, always eschewing it in preference for something savoury.  So for as long as I can remember Charlie’s birthday “cake” has been haggis.  And not just any old haggis if I can possibly help it, because according to his father, it has to be a MacSween’s haggis from Edinburgh.  As far as Richard is concerned that is the authentic taste of haggis, which his father always brought back from Edinburgh when he visited (he was at school in the city) and no doubt his father before him (who was at Medical School there, and an authentic Scot).

The MacSween’s website says that haggis is made from “Simply lamb, beef, oats, onions and spices, nothing more, nothing less. Haggis is basically like an oaty, spicy mince and a great source of iron, fibre and carbohydrate with no artificial colours, flavourings or preservatives” which is a rather optimistic way of describing a product made from a sheep’s stomach stuffed with minced sheep’s pluck (lungs, liver and heart), oatmeal and flavoured with pepper and other spices.  We have always been a family of offal eaters – I’m a great believer in Nose to Tail Eating – if I’m going to eat an animal I don’t believe that I should just be eating the prime cuts.  It does the animal a disservice to not eat all that it has to offer and anyway offal, if well-cooked, can be really tasty.  If you’ve never had slow-cooked stuffed hearts you are really missing out on a culinary treat.  The fact that MacSweens gloss over what is really inside a haggis means that most people nowadays do not share my opinion and that I think is a real crime to the animals that people eat.

As an aside Richard once bought half a pig that someone at work was rearing, and when it arrived, butchered, it appeared with three sets of lungs….. evidently no-one else was prepared to deal with them.  If you ever decide that you will give lung a chance take it from me they sing as they boil, as the air expands and is forced out of the areola, the small air-filled sacks in the lungs, which is what lungs are all about, after all. Three sets of lungs is an awful lot of meat and I’m afraid to say we didn’t get through it all before we got fed up with it, but if we were ever to go through a financial crisis I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it, although liver, heart and kidneys are further up my list of delicious things to eat.  But take it from me lung is much more enjoyable in a Haggis, than boiled, singing, on a stove top.

Kirsty, a Scot who works for Richard, arranged for us to join in the Burn’s Night Celebrations at Mr. Harry.  She was joined by another Richard who said he was English through and through, Marta a Pole and the two of us, me with the claims to my Scottish roots going back to the McGougan’s of Gigha (a tiny island off the Mull of Kintyre) which apparently my great grandmother quoted frequently, but which work on the family tree some years back revealed that we are talking about a family moving south in the early 1700s. So I’m not Scottish at all really.  They have graves in Westminster Abbey – don’t get excited, I have no famous roots – their graves are in the cloisters, along with those of others who must have been living locally at the time.

The small restaurant was packed and we started the proceedings with a hot fruit punch liberally fortified with whisky to become a Hot Toddy (the evening was brought to us in association with The Glenlivet) after which a piper appeared. From where I’m not quite certain – certainly not Scotland – but possibly from Canada, but he had a set of bag pipes which he could play, and a kilt and instead of a dirk (the ceremonial dagger) in his socks he had a hip-flask.  In such a small room the pipes were very loud, goodness knows that the people in the next door restaurants thought.

The first course consisted of smoked salmon on bannocks and a quarter of a scotch egg served with “piccalilli”, which was followed by a Cullen Skink, normally a thick Scottish soup made with smoked haddock, potatoes & onions.  This soup seemed to have seen very little fish, or potatoes, for that matter.

Then the piper arrived again, piping in the haggis, and with the main course well and truly paraded around the restaurant with a couple of Scots then reading out the Address to the main attraction & stabbing said haggis with a kitchen knife (a rare piece of equipment in this country where the chopper is the only kitchen cutter of choice) before giving a toast of whisky to the lassies present and the reply to the toast to the lassies.  The menu described the main course as Haggis, Neeps and Tatties, which is what you would expect for a Burn’s Night Supper, but the Haggis was strange and overly seasoned with pepper to disguise what quite, we weren’t quite sure.  The tatties were certainly as they should be, but the Neeps – none of us could work out what they actually were.  They certainly weren’t the mashed swede that they should have been.  Not even Kirsty, a product development manager, who is even more obsessive about food than Richard could work out what we had been given.  I’m sticking with my suggestion of white daicon radish dyed pink, in the absence of any other forthcoming contender.  It was served with a very strange whisky sauce which seemed to add insult to injury.

Next listed on the menu was Cranachan Trifle and Scottish Shortbread Biscuits, but the owner announced a change of plan and we thought he was joking when he said deep fried chocolate bar.  But he wasn’t.  When it arrived we actually looked forward to eating the traditional deep fried Mars bar as neither I nor Richard had had it before. But that too turned into a disappointment because they were deep-fried snickers bars instead.

At least The Glenlivet 12 Excellence Single Malt didn’t disappoint.

And then the die-hard Scots in the room got up and cleared a space about the size of our apartment’s spare bedroom for a ceilidh – the piper still around to provide the music for The Gay Gordons and various Scottish other country dances.

The moral I think is the opposite to the usual advice:

Do try this at home (but not in Shanghai).