The place
Sweet & Sour is located in an innocuous-looking building on the quieter stretch of Nanjing Xi Lu. Quite a few new restaurants have been popping up here, enticed by the promise of decent foot traffic and a well-known address, even if it means being situated in an office block.
It's a large, sprawling space with seating for around 160, and an edgy industrial chic décor that veers towards futuristic in places.
It's also owned by one of Shanghai's more seasoned restauranteurs, a James Sing, whose other restaurant is Australian spot Kakadu.
The food
Here Sing's gone for an incredibly ambitious menu of the "world's best Chinese dishes," that is, Chinese dishes from around the world, namely Canada, Australia, South America and even Africa.
First up we'd like to say that this is a fascinating idea, and on paper sounds fantastic.
The reality is incredibly hard to pull off. Each dish from those vastly differing regions comes with its own respective methods, flavoring and heritage. When stripped of contextual identity, having a collection of these dishes on one menu honestly doesn't make much sense.
One example is Sweet & Sour's rendition of General Tso's chicken (below, RMB66). Judging from the picture, it looks nothing like what most people know of this classic (originally Hunanese) dish. Sing tells us this made how Chinese communities in the Caribbean do it, apparently with a hint of jerk chicken seasoning. Either way, not improvement on the original.
Stewed beef brisket (below, RMB74) came served on a crispy noodle cake (we'd actually ordered beef chow mien, RMB62, but the waitress heard us wrong), unsettlingly sweet and overpowering any 'rich star anise' flavors the menu description promised.
Similarly dire were the honey garlic pork spare ribs (below, RMB72), imbued with more sugary, unsatisfying flavors that robbed the ribs of any positive qualities it might formerly have had.
Worst of all was cream corn fish (RMB72), a beloved Hong Kong comfort food normally involving fried fish filets in creamed corn sauce. Except they forgot the cream corn and just put canned corn on plain breaded fish. To Sweet & Sour's credit, this dish was whisked away before we'd managed to eat much, with an explanation that the chef had "misunderstood the dish and used the wrong corn."
Therein lies the problem: Sweet & Sour's recruited local Shanghainese chefs to cook these dishes, and you can almost imagine their confusion in being told to make Chinese food in such a far removed manner.
On the plus side, certain dishes fare better, sweet & sour fish (above, RMB72) was a genuine success, all sticky sauce, crispy fish and fresh juicy green peppers. Also good was the prawn toast (below, RMB38), one of the few things Sweet & Sour imbues with a homemade feel.
Cocktails brought us down to earth with a bump. Our caipiroska (RMB55) had a strangely medicinal taste to it, and more fool us for trying Sweet & Sour's rendition of a mai tai (RMB66), one of the worst we've tried in recent memory.
Food verdict: 1/3
The vibe
It's still early days for this restaurant, and if/when it fills up with patrons it should have a lively, upbeat atmosphere. Right now it's sparsely populated, but it's not unreasonable to think it'll get busier in future if the food improves.
Unfortunately, the fuwuyuan are still finding their feet in terms of speaking English. They also have their work cut out for them considering the size of the place, and it took several arm-waves to grab their attention from the other side of the room.
Vibe verdict: 0/1
Value for money
Without wishing to be unfair to Sweet & Sour, our experience at their restaurant underlined our respect for the work that Fung Lam and David Rossi are doing over at Fortune Cookie, which is arguably the best in class when it comes to non-local Chinese food in Shanghai. Turns out this perceivedly humble style of cooking is actually pretty damn hard to pull off.
Even more terrifying, Sing tells us that Sweet & Sour's already lengthy menu has yet more dishes to be added, which strikes as being way over what the kitchen can currently handle. We wish they'd focus on doing a few dishes really well, rather than the entire global pantheon of migrated Chinese food badly.
Value for money: 0/1
TOTAL VERDICT: 1/5
Price: RMB120-250 per person
Who's going: Mainly expats
Good for: non-local Chinese food
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