On the 12th floor of t he city's historical Jinjiang Hotel is where you can find the Shanghai Yard, a restaurant which serves refined Chinese cuisine.

Compared to most Chinese restaurants in the city, it is a luxury and high-end eatery, no matter which culinary style they each specialize in. And you can easily find this out with just a glance at its menu, which shows not only "beautiful" prices but also rare and valuable ingredients,such as abalone, shark's fin, mullet roes and bird's nest.

The restaurant is quite new and decorated in a nostalgic Chinese style. Its red-ood furniture, dark carpet and embroidered curtains all amount to a magnificent atmosphere and indicate its superiority as more than just a place to eat. The private rooms seem to be more popular than the dining hall, since many guests are entrepreneurs and celebrities.

What I ordered at the Shanghai Yard was a set of six dishes served in the Western dinner style. The appetizer was a combination of small portions of cold dishes like jelly fish and sauteed shrimp, both very typical Shanghainese food.W h a t came next was one of the restaurant's signature dishes - shark's fin soup in pumpkin. Just like its name indicates, the dish had an interesting presentation - the pumpkin pulp was excavated out and replaced with the shark's fin soup. The soup tasted mild but a bit sweet due to the influence of t he pumpkin. The chef there told me that the soup was made of abalone, duck, preserved ham, pigeon and ribs which were boiled together for more than eight hours.

The soup was contained within t he pumpkin because t he latter helps to remove the slight smell of shark's fin and make the soup more tasty. After finishing the soup, diners can also eat the remaining pulp inside the pumpkin, and the flavor is very pleasant.

Compared to the creative shark's fin soup, the BBQ beef which followed was less impressive.The beef tasted a bit over-fried and the vegetables accompanying it were somewhat greasy.

A dish which was especially worthy of recommendation is the steamed cod fish wit h beancurd. The cod fish tasted very fresh and delicate and t he meat was q uite rich. The dish was said to be steamed with abalone soup and it seemed that the fish had well absorbed the extract.

The dim sum was typical of Shanghainese dishes - a steamed meat bun and theglutinous rice balls in red-bean soup. The former was succulent and delicious but a bit oily, while the latter was quite tasty,not as sweet as the ordinary kind, and properly sticky.

Generally speaking, the food ser ved in the Shanghai Yard was quite good, fresh and of a high quality.But a dinner which is commonly priced at thousands of yuan is still a luxurious consumption t hat is out of reach for most Chinese people.

The Shanghai Yard
Location: 12F, Jinjiang Hotel 59 South Maoming Road
Tel: 021-64155959