shanghai grocery store 上海鋪

In my childhood growing up in Hong Kong one place we lived in Tsim Sha Tsui has a Shanghai grocery store on the ground level. There are certain things my parents would buy from that shop and most of these food are etched in my young mind. Most I forgot until seeing this Shanghai grocery store recently.

It was one weekday before noon I was bumming around Causeway Bay killing time before meeting up with my relative for lunch. I chanced upon this store that sells Shanghai and Northern Chinese food stuffs. Hong Kong has a number of stores like these but you now have to look harder to find them. This one sell very high quality goods and they serves a lot of more affluent residents - some lives on the mid level. I asked the the lady owner if I can take pictures and she welcomed me doing so. My experience in Hong Kong is while a lot of businesses discourage photos reputable and successful businesses with a long history nearly always do not have problem with it. Many are happy that you admire them.


the green vegetable 雪菜 (translated as snow vegetable) in the middle shelf is salted leaves and stem of carrot or daikon. it is used for cooking

 

glutenous rice stick (call year cake 年糕) is very similar to that eaten by Koreans

 the middle shelf has some dessert that I had in childhood

 more cooking conidments - the one on the bottom is a root vegetable cured in dark soy source

the boxes contain sweet dumplings made of glutenous rice flour with roasted nuts inside - very Shanghaian

in the jars in the middle you see the salted whole crabs - it is very similar to the salted crabs used in Thai papaya salid

 jars of different salted clams

 a lot of vegetable from Northern Chinese provinces

 

many totally foreign to me

dried duck gizzards and dried pig leg tendons

 i think these are tea eggs

Chinese salt cured ham - like Spanish jamon but mainly used for cooking

other salt cured meat and sausages - the dark sausages typically contains duck liver

A post of Shanghai grocery store is incomplete without the mention of Northern hairy crabs 大閘蟹. The most expensive ones here is $8,800 HKD for a package of 42 crabs. That works out to about $27 USD each crab slightly bigger than blue crabs. It is a prized delicacy but alas I have not tried it.
As anything that fetches a very high price in recent years these hairy crabs 大閘蟹 also suffered from food adulteration scandals we read about even in the West.
Traditionally the prized crabs that are sold as hairy crabs 大閘蟹 only come from specific lakes in Northeastern China. The high prices attracts unethical suppliers who now obtain similar looking crabs from many other inland water. Many of these water are polluted. As with a lot of delicacies in Hong Kong (and China inland too) the experienced shopper is safer to buy only from reputable stores that has a long operating history.

nearby is a genuine Shanghai casual restaurant that sell very simple but good comfort food; I expect they have very good soy milk here

meeting up with my relative we went to a Chiuchow 潮州 (Chaozhou in Mandarin) restaurant for lunch; it was quite expensive but the food was very good
as with a Chiuchow cuisine 潮州菜 the meal stared with a hearty soup (not pictured); it was pig stomach with over-the-top amount of ground white pepper corns; the fried rice is quite unique as it was very light and fluffy with crispy bits of vegetable; the dish in the middle is pieces of braised duck; the clay bowl is made with taros and other vegetable very creamy because of the taros

I picked this steam minced pork with salted vegetable - it would have been good if we had plain rice instead of the fried rice to go with it

apart from the pig stomach soup, the fried rice stand out the most for me; the duck was good but it consisted of the inferior bits and ends left over from the more expensive dish they sell during dinner hours