"Nouveau" Shanghainese
Some people knock this place for not serving "real" Shanghainese food. Others describe the chef as "reinterpreting" classic Shanghainese dishes. I can certainly empathize with using authenticity as a measure for how much you like a restaurant or how good you think it is, but since I am no expert on the different regional dishes and styles, this conundrum didn't affect me one way or the other. I thought the food was darn tasty.
Barbeque-flavored fish

If you're familiar with the cha siu seasoning of the barbequed pork buns you can get at dimsum ("the puffy white balls," as my friend Sasha refers to them), transpose that sweet sauce flavor onto grilled fish. Not bad! It was good that this was an appetizer, because too much of it would have gotten sickly, but it was a nice, strong start to the meal. A fish-piece edge or two were a little overcooked, but by and large it was nicely done. That's one of the nice things about eating in Asia -- fish is much more popular here than in the US, so it's much rarer that you come across a badly cooked one (but it does still happen). We also had jellyfish as a starter, which provided a good counterbalance to the sweetness of the barbeque sauce.
Veggies

This is a vegetable called ma lan tou. I have no idea what the English name is, if there is one. It's ok, but not my favorite. It's leafy and green, which are usually good veggie characteristics, in my opinion, but it has a slightly bitter taste, kind of like collard greens. Of course, the only time I tend to eat collard greens is when there's also serious comfort food -- fried chicken, barbequed ribs, mashed potatoes, and/or mac and cheese -- around to take some of the edge off <cue fond memory of Hogs on the Hill>. In any case, these were fine, both in their open presentation and fried inside those little horn shapes. The tomato was good, too, but that white thing on top is supposed to be poached scallop. That was the only real disappointment of the entire meal, if you ask me: it was watery, a little cottony, and didn't taste remotely like a scallop, or any kind of food, for that matter. What it tasted most like was a piece of wet tissue paper. Bleah.
Wasabi prawns

These were billed as "Oriental-style wasabi prawns" -- and as you can see from the green color cast, they certainly have wasabi on them. Only the wasabi didn't have much of a kick -- in my book, that probably came out as a plus, because I think if they had really been so heavily coated in hot wasabi, I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the prawn. And these were big, meaty prawns. Yummy. Nor was the wasabi too smoky, another bonus for me, but probably a negative for a purist. Anyway, they have a thin breading in which they're fried before being coated with the wasabi-mayonnaise sauce, which seemed a little much to me -- why bother with the breading, especially if you don't have qualms about splitting with tradition? I think they'd be just as good without, but I liked them nonetheless. This might have been my favorite dish of the meal, in fact.
Mango chicken

I admit to being a little skeptical about this dish at first, but wow, this was so much better than American-Chinese sweet and sour chicken. First of all, the chicken looks like chicken, not like some puffy breaded mess, and it's juicy. The dish was still stir-fried and still sweet, but not to the point of sickliness, and it didn't have that stickiness you get with the local takeout joint's version. And the mango and pepper strips were delicious, still firm and not overcooked. I'm not sure what's up with the big strip of phyllo that it's presented on... I guess it's pretty, but it didn't seem to go with the dish.
Slow-braised pork

Between the mango chicken and the pork, we also had wonton soup (decent, but not particularly memorable), tofu with minced pork and mushroom, and another veggie dish. I was pretty full by the chicken course, so I stocked up on veggies, but not so much on the tofu and soup. The slow-braised pork was good -- again, falling-apart tender; they really love slow-braising meat here -- but I could only manage one mouthful before calling it a night. No dessert, or we would have had to roll ourselves out of the building.