Ideal place to meet 'mom' and 'dad'

There is a new restaurant in town, and connoisseurs are tagging it 'the ideal place for impecunious gentlemen to treat and impress prospective parents-in-law for the first meeting'.

Why would a shrewd young man choose this particular restaurant to meet his future mother-in-law? Bluntly put, the restaurant offers excellent value for money, but appears high-end and extravagant - appearances bound to tickle the fancy of the widely known snobbish Shanghainese mother-in-law.

Jade Garden, or Cui Yuan, may share its English name with another chain of restaurants serving Shanghainese cuisine, but this one is a venerable 42-year-old from Hong Kong operated by the Maxim Group. It is known particularly for its dim sum, and wildly popular among yumcha aficionados.

In Shanghai, Jade Garden occupies the entire fourth floor of Jing'an Kerry Center, with a seating capacity of more than 300 and 11 private dining halls.

For appetizers, we are served with the restaurant's signature barbecued suckling piglet, which was very satisfying. The chef proudly says it takes an impressive display of skills to roast a one-month-old piglet to perfect crispness and still retain the succulence of the meat within.

My favorite is the steamed shrimp on egg white in rice liquor, not only because of the intoxicating aroma, or the shelled sweet tiger prawns from Vietnam, but also because the velvety white custard had fully absorbed the essence of all the ingredients.

Forget the silverware carefully placed in front of you. Eat the prawns whole and then slurp up the egg white custard.

The chicken that followed is crispy, fried, and boneless, stuffed with more shrimps. Again, the bird satisfies the two main criteria held by finicky Cantonese gourmets who demand that the traditional roast chicken must have crisp golden skin and tender, juicy meat.

The challenges in perfecting the dish are many, starting with how to select an appropriately plump chicken. But for diners, the rich textures of shrimp, chicken, water chestnuts and the breadcrumb coating were more than enough.

Braised bamboo pith fungus stuffed with mixed fungi more than holds its own here. A deceptively simple dish, the sliced fungi, tofu, carrot are cooked in broth first before being stuffed into the fungus tubes. Then the rolls are steamed and drizzled with some "secret sauce" for hours, and finally garnished with peas and wolfberries.

As William Golding, the English novelist, put it in Lord of Flies, the greatest ideas are the simplest.

For desserts, the 13-cm-tall fresh fruit napoleon, higher than an upright chopstick, is inspired by the 101 skyscraper in Taipei and features at least five layers of fresh fruits in between light puff pastry.

While the unusually tall napoleon is more a visual feast, the larger-than-palm-sized baked pineapple bun is a real tantalizer. It came into the room almost naked, placed on a simple white plate with a slab of butter on the side.

The jumbo bun is perfectly fine without the butter if calorie counting works against the appetite, but once you take a whole bite, it will be pretty hard to resist the temptation. It is crunchy lardy-sugary outside, fluffy bread below, and juicy pineapple cubes drenched in partially melted butter.

It is not only one of the few pineapple buns in town that actually has pineapples, but is also attractively priced at 18 yuan ($3) per serving. Each serve is sufficient for three to four people as an after-meal desert, but is impressive enough to coax even the normally stern father-in-law to give away his dear daughter's hand in marriage.

If You Go

Jade Garden (Cui Yuan)

4F, Jing'an Kerry Center South Block, 1238 Yan'an Road M, Jing'an district, Shanghai. 

Average cost per head: 150 yuan for lunch, 200 yuan for dinner.

Recommended: Crispy Barbecued Suckling Piglet, Steamed Shrimp in Rice Liquor, Fried Boneless Chicken Stuffed with Minced Shrimp, Baked PIneapple Bun.