Yingqiao Homely Snack - Shanghai

After an excruciatingly long flight to Shanghai, we arrived at the Minya Hotel in Shanghai and immediately start exploring for food nearby. We found the Yingqiao Homely Snack restaurant on Boshan Road in Pudong:

The ordering system in China is a little different than what we're used to: 

1) Decide on what you want and order and pay for your food at the front

2) Pick a table and sit down (if the restaurant is packed - sometimes random people sit at your table if you have seats available)

3) Flag a waiter/waitress down to give them your receipt and so that they know which table you're sitting at

4) Wait for your food to be brought out and served 

Salty pickled vegetables and pork in noodle soup 

It's recommended that travelers drink bottled water in China rather than the tap water since the filtration system in China isn't as developed as other established countries.

We could taste the difference in the broth: Shanghai water has a weird and slightly unpleasant taste. 

However, the noodles with the pickled vegetables and pork were very tasty. They gave us a lot of noodles for ¥7 (that's about $1.15 CAD or USD!).

Pork Chop in Noodle Soup ¥10

We saw a lot of people here order the pork chop, so we thought it would be worth a try. 

It was terrible, we couldn't even finish it. The pork chop was cold and it tasted bad.

Pork and vegetable fried noodles ¥8

This was actually really good! The noodles in sauce was delicious. It's quite difficult to recreate the Shanghai noodle sauce - I swear they have some secret ingredient they all use to make their fried noodles taste amazing. The downside of this dish was that it was very oily. 

In general, Northern Chinese cuisine tends to be very oily in comparison to Southern Chinese and Hong Kong cuisine. Northern dishes have all the flavour and can be really delicious, but they just use extra oil when cooking.