Thumbs-up for local cuisine

Hotel Indigo on the Bund has marketed its new set menu, "Your neighborhood fl avors", as a part of InterContinental's 30-year anniversary in China, hoping to bring back to life all your childhood memories of food in your neighborhood.

Well, my childhood neighborhood has long disappeared, and the apartment buildings I have lived in since hardly make up a neighborhood, as everyone acts so distant that I am not sure if I have a next-door neighbor.

But this new menu, created by chef Song Yu, better known as Vincent Song, creates a new culinary memory of the Bund neighborhood for me, thanks to Song's earlier experience "as an outcast in the Chinese traditional cooking school".

"During my time, good students went to state-owned restaurants and poor ones went to Western cafes and bu+ ets, and that's how I ended up cooking steak and frying cod," Song says.

Of course, the executive chef of the fi ve-star hotel was being modest. Yet, the "neighborhood fl avors" seasoned by Song taste refreshingly exotic and rich, just like the architectural styles of the Bund, varying from the Gothic to the Baroque, to the Classic.

For appetizers, two out of the traditional eight "Shanghai small cold dishes" are selected in accordance with the season, an idea that Song said originated from Chinese ancient culinary ideology but gained its popularity in recent years in the Western dining world.

Meat and fi sh sit centerstage and together on the menu as well as the dining table, as every hospitable Shanghai household would arrange when treating a guest.

The red braised smoked fi sh is a traditional appetizer in Shanghai cuisine, but is reinvented by chef Song with a rare modernism as an entree.

Imported cod from Iceland replaces the usual black carp, often caught from the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. While the texture is similar, the latter is much safer for a voracious bite with its few bones.

As a born and bred Shanghainese, I wished the fi sh could be coated with more of the shiny, sugary red soy sauce.

But my lunch mates appeared satisfi ed enough with the spices from the herbs and chilies atop the fi sh. The steak piccata with noodles is the perfect example of East meeting West.

A derivative of the Italian traditional veal piccata, the steak, a fi ne-quality grass-fed meat from Cape Grim, Australia, is unusually juicy and tender, and tastes already flavorful after being coated and sauteed in egg and light cheese.

The typical Shanghai noodle with soy sauce is over-served, especially after two palm-sized rump steaks. But the good thing is the shallot spread and the tomato salsa have made it light and delightful for another few bites. The dessert, mango and spice crumble with fresh cream, arrives "disassembled" and barely "neighborly".

It's more like a visitor from abroad. As we assemble the dessert ourselves, pouring the dairy into the pan-like bowl fi lled with crunchy crumbles and stirring the mangoes from below, chef Song explains in haste about this "alien visitor", before any one of us asks: How does this tropical dessert sneak into the Shanghai- neighborhood-themed menu?

"It's not like we cannot make an appropriate local dessert, like jiuniang yuanzi (glutinous rice balls in fermented rice wine)," says Song, half jokingly. "We would just like to make the neighborhood a little more international and embracing, just like the city. And we cannot think of anything better than a dessert using the fruit of the season."

Address: 6F, Hotel Indigo Shanghai on the Bund, 585 Zhongshan Road E2, Huangpu district

Telephone: 021-3302-9999

The set menu is available until the end of June. Lunch is priced at 230 yuan ($36.80) per person for three courses and dinner costs 330 yuan per head for four courses. Some of the courses will still be available after June.