Five Loaves

Wang Bao He claims to be Shanghai’s oldest restaurant with a history dating back to 1936.  This brightly lit restaurant has a traditional Chinese decor.  Its another place you should not go without reservations.  They are famous for making rice wine and cooking Shanghai’s famous hairy crab.  Crab dominates the menu, almost every dish in the menu utilizes crab as an ingredient.

I always make it a habit to have the hairy crabs when I’m in Shanghai.  The hairy crabs are smaller than our Pacific Northwest Dungeness crabs.  As you can see from the photo, they are not called hairy crab for nothing.  This delicacy is in season during September to January.  Actually, the crabs do not have much meat, but they are prized for their roe.

They served up sweet ginger tea along side to tea.  Its really your choice what you want to drink.  The sweet ginger tea helps the body balance out the yin and yang because the crabs have a cooling effect and ginger a warm effect on the body.

We started with the Crab Roe and Beef Tendon Jelly appetizer.  The beef tendon and crab roe was infused nicely with a beef stock.  It was sliced thinly and evenly.  This provided a perfect texture for the jelly.

The scissors are used to assist us opening the crab legs.  There was not much eat in the legs, but the crab meat was quite sweet.

These are the same crabs in the earlier photo.  Notice that the steamed crabs have a vivid reddish orange color.  The strings are untied and plated.  I totally forgot to take a photo of the crab roe, but imagine the whole crab shell was full of roe.

I loved Stewed Codfish and Crab Meat with Chaozhou Vegetables Soup.  Generous amount seafood and vegetables in the soup.  The soup was quite light and had a full body of seafood flavors.

Next, the braised bean curd and crab meat was excellent to with plain rice.

This Baohe Crab Meat Pastry was very similar to BBQ Pork Pastry.  Flaky and delicate pastry filled with a crab meat.  The the crab filling was moist and baked to perfection.

The Fried Shrimp and Crab Meat Balls was soft and delicate.  They used shrimp for the exterior and crab for the interior.  It was very clever not to have the crab meat exposed to direct oil during the frying process.

Finally, the prawn and crab meat stir fry was a very tasty dish.  The two items complimented each other very well.  Seems that it drew the natural flavor from both ingredient and infused it together.

Five Loaves Rating:
Value: 8/10
Quality: 9/10
Overall: 8.5/10

Verdict: Crab dominates the menu, almost every dish in the menu utilizes crab as an ingredient and its delicious!

Wang Bao He
603 Fuzhou Road
Shanghai, China
021/6322-3673
Daily 11am-1pm and 5-9pm