MOVING WITH THE TIMES
Serving up Shanghai staples in Beijing since 1956, Meiweizhai is an old-style eatery that likes to keep up with the latest trends, Li Yingxue reports.
Dressed in qipao and Chinese suits, guests enter the dining room accompanied by melodious folk music — in a scene reminiscent of the old days of Shanghai of the 1930s.
This was the celebration to mark the first anniversary of Meiweizhai’s reopening in Beijing on June 26, launched in tandem with another timehonored brand, Refosian custom tailors.
Meiweizhai’s pastry chef and tailors from Refosian worked together to create flour-based pankou (cloth buttons folded into the shape of flowers), to show off their mastery of their joint professions.
First opened in Shanghai in 1923, Meiweizhai expanded to Beijing in 1956, answering the call of late premier Zhou Enlai for Shanghai business owners to help develop Beijing as the country’s new capital after the founding of New China in 1949.
According to Tian Haishan, vice-manager of Meiweizhai, the restaurant closed in the 1990s due to city planning measures, but it subsequently reopened in Baiguang Lu in Xicheng district in 2005.
Meiweizhai added a takeout window in 2013, selling snacks such as pan-fried buns, sweet and sour pork ribs, baked bran, meatballs and spring rolls.
“The takeout window was really popular as soon as it was opened. There were long lines along the street then,” says Tian, who joined Meiweizhai in 1993 after graduating from culinary school.
In 2017, the restaurant closed again, before reopening in smaller premises in Guang’anmennei Dajie, a couple of kilometers away. While the Shanghai outlet still operates only as a snack bar, the Beijing restaurant has retained its traditional flavors and is trying to keep pace with the times.
“When we reopened in 2017, we decided to make the restaurant more of a fast-food style as people now, especially the younger ones, have less time to eat,” says Tian.
The restaurant is decorated in the style of old Shanghai, while the menu has been simplified for convenience. “To ensure that all the dishes can be served within 15 minutes after ordering, we had to pare down the old menu and drop the dishes that took too long to prepare,” says Tian.
The new menu includes some of the Shanghai dishes they originally brought to Beijing in 1956, as well as some newer fusion dishes combining the culinary cultures of East and West.
Only around 30 hot dishes remain from the previous version of menu, which originally included more than 400 dishes. “It was a tough decision, as each dish is like a child to me. But due to the size of the new premises, we had to make some important choices,” Tian says.
The newly reopened Meiweizhai has proved a success. Always full and popular with families — from infants to grandparents in their 70s and 80s — diners flock there to enjoy the authentic tastes of Shanghai and indulge in their favorite dishes.
Its popularity is such that the Shanghai eatery has become part of the collective memory of the people who grew up in the neighborhood.
A man in his 80s had been a regular customer since he moved to Beijing from Shanghai in 1953 after graduation, and Meiweizhai has been providing him with a taste of home ever since it opened three years later.
Even though dining out in the 1970s and 1980s was not as commonplace as it is now, he always tried to bring his family or friends to eat at Meiweizhai every Sunday — and all his memories and important life experiences seem to blend with the flavors of the restaurant.
He always likes to order the vegetable rice, a traditional Shanghai dish which combines vegetables, rice and lard, and retains the same flavor as it did half a century ago.
Pan-fried buns (sheng jian bao) are a favorite with regulars, which are fried to a golden color on the bottom and contain a filling of chopped pork and pork jelly. The jelly takes three hours to make via a nine-step cooking process.
They are now presented in five colors — white, green, orange, purple, and black — and are made with spinach, pumpkin, purple cabbage and edible bamboo charcoal powder.
Even though Meiweizhai likes to combine classical flavors with a modern twist, the traditional Shanghai dishes have not been forgotten.
To mark its first anniversary, three private rooms at the restaurant have reopened after a lengthy renovation, and many of their signature dishes that were taken off the menu have made a return.
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“The private rooms have to be booked in advance so that we have time to prepare the dishes,” says Tian, who is happy to bring around 200 time-consuming dishes back to the table.
Baked bread chicken is a new signature dish, updating the traditional dish of beggar’s chicken, which uses a 1.5-kilogram chicken wrapped in lotus leaves and flour before being roasted for four hours — and which used to be covered in mud to aid the cooking process.
“We asked a retired chef to teach us the recipe for beggar’s chicken, which is not easy to find in the capital,” says Tian.
Meiweizhai is planning to open its first sub-branch in Beijing, expanding from its original neighborhood for the first time in 60 years. In another first, the restaurant is also planning to expand its operations to Japan and even farther afield. “We are also trying to find a location in Canada, which is a new challenge for us,” Tian says.