LING LONG

34—34 / 136

When Asia's 50 Best Restaurants was announced this past March, there was only one restaurant I cared about: LING LONG. It was the high point of my trip to Shanghai last year, one of the finest dining experiences I have had anywhere in Asia. At the time of my visit it sat at No. 27 on Asia's 50 Best Restaurants, a ranking I felt badly undersold it, and watching it climb to No. 9 this year only confirmed that I had not been wrong. Even so, I think No. 9 still undervalues it. This was fine dining worthy of Asia's top three.

The main purpose of that Shanghai trip was not food but a photography shoot. Still, wanting to eat well, I asked a well-known gourmet friend of ours for a recommendation, and the answer was blunt: this one place, and nothing else. That settled it.

Reservations open two months in advance, and even for locals LING LONG is known as one of the hardest tables to book in Shanghai. When I first tried, the next two months were already full. By sheer luck a good opening came my way and I was able to go. It pays to be bold.

This was fine dining worthy of Asia's top three.

The setting is the Waldorf Astoria, which stands on the Bund (外灘), Shanghai's great riverside landmark along the Huangpu River (黃浦江). The hotel itself is magnificent.

2—2 / 136

Built in 1911 in the English Renaissance style, the former Shanghai Club was a British gentlemen's club founded in 1861, and through the 1920s and 1930s it was the center of the city's highest society.

1—136 / 136

LING LONG occupies the heritage building that preserves it. The 110-foot Long Bar, once the longest bar in the world, has been restored exactly as it was, and in 2010 the building reopened as the first Waldorf Astoria in Asia.

3—8 / 136

In the ground-floor lobby, servers circulate with champagne and water in a way that recreates the social atmosphere of the early twentieth century, and since we were told we could simply help ourselves, I had a glass.

4—4 / 136

Chef Jason Liu is from Taiwan. He began his career in Taipei at fourteen, learned reduction technique in French fine-dining kitchens, then moved to Beijing and spent a year traveling across China studying its regional cooking before opening LING LONG Beijing in 2019. In 2022, before turning thirty, he won both a Michelin star for the Beijing restaurant and the Young Chef Award, and after expanding to Shanghai in 2023 the Shanghai outpost earned its own star within just a few months. What stands out is that he now stays mostly in Shanghai, where the restaurant is the better regarded of the two; he is said to be renovating the Beijing location into a new restaurant.

5—9 / 136

At LING LONG you choose your menu when booking, and there are two.

13—14 / 136

Inspirational Set Menu (1,680 plus 15% service charge per person)

Classical Set Menu (1,980 plus 15% service charge per person)

(These were the prices at the time of my visit.)

18—18 / 136

The difference lay in the seafood dishes and the desserts. Since I will likely come here only once or twice in a lifetime, I chose the Classical Set, reasoning it would show the restaurant at its fullest, and I think I chose right. The main is duck by default, with wagyu available for a supplement, but I prefer duck and stayed with the standard choice.

The interior is dark, with strong, contrasting light that creates a dramatic mood. There are about eight tables and one private room.

10—10 / 136

The kitchen sits at the front, though, as at Mosu or San, the sightline is not especially open.

15—15 / 136

The course begins with amuse-bouche. The whole meal is organized into chapters, each with a clear theme, and the flow that evening ran: Xian (鮮) → Tradition → Localization → Recollection → Memory

19—19 / 136

The first chapter, Xian Taste (鮮), turns on a concept central to Chinese cooking. Written with the character for "fresh," it nominally means "fresh taste," but in practice it refers to a deep, expansive savouriness that spreads through the mouth. The server explained that xian emerges when paired with something acidic. Where Japanese umami centers on savouriness itself, xian is a broader idea that takes in freshness and aroma as well.

132—132 / 136

Before the meal, a cart is wheeled over and a cup of tea is served to start. It was a white tea from Fujian. Looking it up afterward, it seemed to be an aged white tea with a plum-blossom aroma (白梅老白茶); I know little about tea, but I could tell this was good.

20—22 / 136

The first amuse was fish: yellow croaker.

25—25 / 136

It seemed steamed, topped with cilantro and other southern spices. Shaken by the poor-quality seafood I had eaten elsewhere the day before, I ate carefully, but happily the fish here was of good quality.

26—29 / 136

Any fishiness or off note was well controlled, though the type and treatment were not especially bold, so the amuse itself was a good opener rather than a striking one, and it paired nicely with the accompanying champagne.

16—17 / 136

The second amuse was porcini, served as a single bite. A thin shell on the outside enclosed an aged-porcini ice cream, finished with mushroom sliced thin and arranged as a flower on top. It was sized to go in exactly one mouthful, so that the moment you pick it up and put it in, every element fires at once.

32—32 / 136

Because the first amuse had been fairly ordinary, I went in with no expectations.

And then it just detonated, right there.

The instant I bit down, the dense presence of porcini landed with real weight, and it was wonderful. The concentrated, woody aroma peculiar to dried porcini felt compressed into a single bite, and releasing it cold as an ice cream was a fine choice. The cold temperature held the aroma in place, so that as it melted slowly the flavour unfurled in stages. The thinly sliced mushroom on top was not mere decoration either; it met the roof of the mouth as a distinct texture, adding dimension within the single bite. Visual, texture, aroma: not one was missing, a precisely calculated mouthful.

30—31 / 136

The last amuse was not a bite but a soup, impressive in both taste and presentation. Before serving, it arrived as a large tray hung with several big chicken legs, and at first I wondered whether a chicken dish was coming. Suspending the legs on the tray was a visual device, as if the scene of a butcher's shop or a farm's processing had been brought into the dining room. Showing the tray and then pouring the broth into the bowl was bound into a single staged moment, giving the impact of far more than a simple bowl of soup.

33—33 / 136

This chicken was raised for three years in Tangshan (唐山, Hebei Province) and then aged for 180 days. Considering that a typical table chicken is slaughtered at around six weeks, three years of rearing is an extreme choice made purely to deepen flavour, and a chicken further aged for 180 days is something I have almost never seen.

Yet the chicken does not arrive as meat; it comes as the broth boiled from it. The broth is poured over clams resting in the bowl. These clams, which resemble razor clams, were said to be found in only two places on earth: Fujian in China and Venice in Italy. Few places lay out this much provenance storytelling in a single course.

To begin with, the colour and aroma of the broth over the chicken and clams were superb. Perhaps because the salinity ran slightly high, the depth and weight of flavour were truly outstanding. This was not the surface savouriness an ordinary chicken broth can offer but a depth that came from the dense extraction of three years' rearing and six months' aging. Perhaps because the high cost of the course lets them pour the ingredient budget into aging the chicken, this was close to the best chicken broth I have ever tasted. Creativity aside, the stronger impression was of a chef who understands, at its core, how to build flavour.

35—36 / 136

Creativity aside, the stronger impression was of a chef who understands, at its core, how to build flavour.

With the course proper underway, the second chapter, Tradition, begins. The first dish was lobster, visually a beautiful plate. The jelly set over the lobster was made from ten-year-aged yellow wine (黃酒). Shaoxing (紹興) yellow wine is a grain brew based on glutinous rice; the longer it ages, the more amino acids develop, deepening its savouriness and complicating its aroma, and around ten years is the point at which off notes fade and a soft, deep fragrance comes alive.

46—46 / 136

Its colour, too, deepens toward amber, and that hue trapped inside the clear jelly set off visually against the white flesh of the lobster. Yellow wine is usually drunk as is or worked into a sauce, so locking it into a jelly is a way of gathering a volatile aroma into a single bite, and it released as it melted in the mouth. Recalling that crustaceans and shellfish such as crab, shrimp, and clams have traditionally been paired with yellow wine, setting a yellow-wine jelly over lobster reads as an interpretation that fits the chapter name Tradition exactly. Turnip and cilantro were set alongside, so a faint cilantro fragrance ran through the whole bite.

38—38 / 136

What I liked best in this dish, above all, was the texture of the lobster. Barely blanched, the flesh felt firm from the first cut, and biting into it gave a springy, resilient texture that was a thing of art. The attempt to render the yellow wine as a jelly was interesting, but the flavour did not arrive as directly as in the other dishes. It seems a dish whose key is delicacy. A somewhat quiet start to the chapter, perhaps, but the precision of technique and the care in ingredient selection were already clear from this one plate.

37—45 / 136

The second dish after the lobster was fish maw. This dish I simply loved, and it was the best of everything I ate across the whole Shanghai trip.

Fish maw is a prized ingredient counted, with abalone and sea cucumber, among the four great dried seafoods (海味). It has little strong flavour of its own, but it is rich in collagen, giving a distinctive slippery yet chewy texture, and it serves as a carrier on which other sauces ride.

Before the dish arrived, a large cheese was shown to us, said to be the first Parmigiano made in China itself. Milk from Mongolian cows was processed in Beijing following the Italian method exactly.

47—47 / 136

Parmigiano can use its name only when it meets specific origin, breed, and aging standards in Italy's Emilia-Romagna under PDO protection, but the very idea of taking that method and recreating it with Mongolian milk shows that China is walking the path of a gastronomic power not only in dining service, which touches the consumer, but also in the domain of ingredients, close to the supplier.

This dish was made by combining that cheese with the Tangshan chicken broth from the earlier course. Inside were fish maw and gnocchi, and the crisp chip on top was also made of cheese. The dot above it was aged tangerine peel (陳皮) from Hong Kong. In Cantonese cooking, the longer aged tangerine peel is, the more it is prized; peel from the Xinhui (新會) region, aged more than ten years, is even used as medicine. Here the citrusy bitterness of the peel naturally cut the weight of the dense cheese sauce.

48—48 / 136

The taste was, to my palate, simply the best. The combination of Parmigiano's richness and nuttiness with the savouriness of the chicken broth was wonderful, and the texture of the fish maw inside was excellent too. The pairing of fish maw and cheese sauce went together beautifully. From the gnocchi worked in as a supporting element to the cheese chip on top, not one part felt out of place. The skill of binding Eastern ingredients (fish maw, chicken broth, tangerine peel) and Western ones (Parmigiano, gnocchi) in a single plate was very fine.

49—53 / 136

At this point I ordered white wine by the glass.

11—24 / 136

Unsure what to choose, I asked for a recommendation, and the sommelier suggested a glass of Leflaive and a Chinese wine from Yunnan. We agreed to have one each, the two of us, and ordered two glasses, whereupon the sommelier said he would give us half-glasses. But the pours were not half-glasses. He gave us a full glass of each on top, four glasses in all.

51—51 / 136

The Yunnan white was Clos MAO "Light (理光)." Made from 100% Chardonnay, it comes from a winery founded by an alumnus of LVMH's Ao Yun winemaking team who went independent. Ao Yun is LVMH's high-altitude wine project in the Himalayan foothills of the upper Mekong in Yunnan, a case that proved the potential of Chinese wine to the global market from its very first vintage. Perhaps because the grapes are grown at 2,300 to 2,500 feet (about 700 to 760 meters), the acidity was good. The 2023 is the first vintage, and with small production it commands a considerable price for a Chinese wine.

54—57 / 136

A glass of Leflaive Bourgogne Blanc was 370 RMB (about 70,000 won), and the Yunnan wine 390 RMB. Yet in taste the Leflaive still had the edge. Domaine Leflaive is a Puligny-Montrachet powerhouse and one of the summits of white Burgundy, so the result was only natural, but pricing the two shoulder to shoulder told me the market price of Chinese wine is not yet coherent. It was a fun experience, and the value is still wanting, but Chinese wine is only beginning; once technique and know-how accumulate, it seems poised, on the back of vast geographic advantages, to rise alongside Japan as a leader of Asian wine production.

The third dish was tung feng chicken, filled with shark's fin and Chinese pickled vegetables. The name "tung feng" comes from the fact that the hotel that once stood on the Waldorf Astoria site was the Tung Feng (Dongfeng) Hotel. The dish takes that hotel's original recipe exactly as it was, and the very method of condensing the time accumulated on the hotel's grounds into a single plate, to present again to the next generation of guests, dovetails perfectly with the Tradition chapter.

59—59 / 136

The dish carried a paper decoration said to be drawn from a kind of spear structure once used by the Japanese army stationed in old China. I am not sure exactly what it meant, but visually it was striking.

58—60 / 136

The chicken tasted good. The shark's fin and pickled vegetables inside made their presence felt, but above all it was the chicken itself that was excellent. A very fatty bird, it released a real burst of juice with each bite. The pickled vegetables helped balance things more than one might notice. Between the fish maw and cheese dish and the tung feng chicken, both dishes of the Tradition chapter left a strong impression.

61—66 / 136

The fourth dish was tilefish, served in a soup style, a fun and memorable plate. Tilefish, prized in Japan as amadai (甘鯛), is a delicate white fish, and to take such a refined fish and render it finely in the genre of "soup" was a surprise. It was originally a signature of LING LONG Beijing. The tilefish was cooked by pouring oil over it until the skin turned thoroughly crisp, which, I was told, is what balances the oily richness of the skin. Repeatedly basting with hot oil so that only the skin crisps while the flesh stays moist is the essence of Cantonese fish cookery, and the idea of placing that inside a soup format is intriguing.

67—67 / 136

Beneath the fish lay white sour soup (白酸湯). White sour soup is a traditional soup of the Guizhou (貴州) region in west-central China. Guizhou is not a well-known area, but it is home to many ethnic minorities and is highly skilled in fermentation and the use of spices; indeed, Guizhou cooking is one of the few Chinese regional cuisines that make sourness (酸) their core. Guizhou has both a red sour soup (紅酸湯) fermented from tomato and a white sour soup (白酸湯) fermented from rice water, and this dish used the latter as a clear, sour base.

68—69 / 136

The dish came with a small wooden stick, which was grated over the top as a powder, much as one might scatter yuzu zest. It is a spice often used in Guizhou, called "litse," with an aroma similar to lemongrass. (This "litse" is presumably Litsea cubeba, written 木姜子 in Chinese. A spice common in Guizhou cooking, it is rich in citral and so gives a citrus aroma exactly like lemongrass.)

70—70 / 136

One taste, and I was surprised in the best way. Balance is usually indispensable in fine dining, yet the sourness of this white sour soup is enormous. The remarkable thing, though, is that it does not make your face pucker or jump out at you; it is pleasantly, deliciously strong. It was a little like hot-and-sour soup, a little like eating tom yum, and I do not think I have ever had a soup dish this good with this kind of sourness. The reason such strong acidity is not unpleasant must be that it is a sourness made by fermentation, different in grain from the harsh acidity of vinegar.

Tomato and herbs are in it too, so drinking it brings to mind Thai food. When I told the manager it felt like Thai food, he said this is a very traditional, distinctive flavour even within the hot regions of China. The tilefish was very well cooked. If the fish maw and cheese dish was a flavour you could more or less predict, this was one you could not. It is in this single plate that the reason the Localization chapter foregrounds "regionality" becomes clear.

71—74 / 136

Before the main, a cart was wheeled over again and the server whisked tea by hand right in front of us. It is a traditional Chinese diancha (點茶) method that I have seen in Japanese dining too, the origin of matcha culture.

117—117 / 136

Diancha is the whisking technique that flourished in the Song dynasty, in which water is poured over powdered tea and beaten with a whisk to raise foam. Japanese matcha and the tea ceremony branched off from exactly this.

77—78 / 136

The tea was a Ya Shi Xiang, or Duck Shit dancong (鴨屎香單樅), oolong from Guangdong. A varietal of the Phoenix dancong grown on Phoenix Mountain (鳳凰山) in Chaozhou (潮州), Guangdong, it gives, contrary to its name, very showy floral and honeyed aromas, a high-grade oolong. At first the floral notes came through so well that I took it for jasmine tea, but it is not jasmine; it is a semi-fermented oolong. This tea is cold-steeped and stored the day before, and on the day a highly concentrated brew is poured over it and whisked. That produces a very creamy foam with a fine particle texture, and drinking it gives a faintly sparkling sensation. What set it apart was that, unlike ordinary floral teas, I actually felt sweetness in the mouth. It was a tea taste I had never had, which was fascinating, and above all the fine bubbles left the mouth feeling fresh.

79—80 / 136

With the tea came a pretty fresh bud of white magnolia (白玉蘭) to smell, giving an intense, unusual floral herbal scent that truly refreshes. White magnolia is the city flower of Shanghai, which fits the chapter's theme of Localization exactly. Before the main, nose and palate were refreshed, and it was an excellent tea chapter that joined a visually pleasing performance with Chinese traditional culture.

76—76 / 136

Something I learned only later: the English name of dancong oolong is "Duck Shit Oolong," so it is also a humorous setup for the duck dish that follows. The Localization chapter was a narrative stretch that unfolded the distinctiveness of China's various regions through taste, smell, and sight all at once.

131—131 / 136

The main was the duck I had chosen in advance. This duck was raised in Huzhou (湖州), a city near Lake Tai (太湖) close to Shanghai. Huzhou, in northern Zhejiang, is famous for silk, brushes, and green tea, and the Lake Tai area has long been a center of Jiangnan food culture. The base is similar to Peking duck, but the cooking method differs.

81—81 / 136

Rather than the Peking-duck method of repeatedly ladling boiling oil over it as it roasts, the duck is cooked by deep-frying it whole. As a result the skin is very crisp, with a texture close to Cantonese roast duck. If Peking duck is slowly cooked in an oven, glazing the skin to a sheen, and Cantonese roast duck is marinated in spices and hung to roast for a more linear crispness, then the Huzhou style works the texture between those two streams through frying. Eating it, the texture of the fat and the skin was indeed superb.

82—89 / 136

The sauce was said to be an homage to Chinese culture. Shanghai has an expression, "Brown Sticky Sauce," for the dense, brown, savoury sauces it favors (tied to the hongshao, or red-braising (紅燒), tradition of Shanghai benbang cuisine (本帮菜)), and LING LONG recreated that register in homage. A vinegar famous in Zhejiang was added to balance the acidity against the rich duck. It was somewhat sweet as well, and came with garnishes of pickles, roasted mushroom, and the like. As impressive as the other dishes were, this duck was excellent too. There was almost no off odor and the flavour was good, but above all the fat and skin were superb. The acidity of the pickles tidied up the richness while the roasted mushroom added woody depth, and there was fun in matching the duck with each garnish one by one.

85—86 / 136

For the final savoury course came a fried rice made with Wuchang rice (五常米). Wuchang rice, from Wuchang City (五常市) in Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China, is one of the most prized famous rices in China, holding a status like Korea's Icheon rice or Japan's Koshihikari, a top-grade variety with overwhelming aroma, stickiness, and sheen. Bringing northeastern rice to the final course of a Shanghai menu seems part of the chef's intent to have you experience ingredients from across China, each once, within LING LONG's chapters.

97—97 / 136

One of LING LONG's strengths is how much gueridon service there is, with carts wheeled right up to the table to show you the dish. There is something to watch in every course, which is a pleasure.

90—90 / 136

Gueridon service was once the pinnacle of classic French dining but has been gradually vanishing under rising costs, so it is interesting that it thrives in Chinese dining. The savoury courses, too, came out partly prepared in the kitchen and were finished tableside before serving. Beyond the rice there are three important elements: cilantro, garlic stems, and white shallot.

91—95 / 136

This rice was made with eight-treasure sauce (八寶醬). "Eight" signifies luck in China, and eight-treasure sauce is a traditional sauce used commonly across the country. The eight-treasure sauce in this dish contained glutinous rice, duck, fish maw, cucumber, pickled vegetables, bamboo shoot, mushroom, and white shallot, and on top of the shallot, cilantro, and garlic stems mentioned earlier, the mushroom is said to build a varied aroma. True to its name of eight treasures, it is a structure in which eight strands of texture and aroma release at once in a single spoonful.

98—98 / 136

This course was truly, truly delicious. Above all the texture and sheen of the rice, so well coated that it loosened beautifully in the mouth, were utterly wonderful. The closest comparable dish that comes to mind is the fish-maw rice I had at WING in Hong Kong; the rice itself, though, seems a notch above WING here. WING, too, is Cantonese dining where fish-maw fried rice is the signature, and this single bowl at LING LONG surpassed that signature in the precision of its aroma and the gloss of its coating. The cilantro added in exactly the right amount gave a fitting fragrance, and the ingredients worked in, the fish maw in particular, enlivened the texture of what might otherwise have been a somewhat plain rice.

I wanted to rate this close to the best savoury course I have ever had in any dining. I went so far as to refill three bowls. At the end they simply scooped out the whole thing and said, "you finish it." The main duck was good too, but this single bowl was the summit of the entire LING LONG course, and the fact that the meal's final savoury dish was its strongest makes clear where the chef's build-up had been heading. In most fine dining the final savoury course leans toward a carbohydrate top-up just before dessert, but LING LONG condenses the essence of its ingredients and strikes here. So satisfaction does not drop as the course nears its end; rather, the impression is that the meal stopped at its peak.

96—101 / 136

With the savoury courses done, the first dessert was a sorbet. First, four ingredients were brought to show: pear, tomato, Buddha's hand citron (佛手柑, a finger-split citrus), and sugarcane, with the idea that you pick one and they make it into a sorbet.

102—104 / 136

So I picked one each, and in the end all four came out.

105—109 / 136

They even gave us a glass each of dessert wine, looking after us generously.

110—110 / 136

Three of these captured the ingredients faithfully as they were, but one in particular stood out: the tomato. The tomato sorbet was made finer, to a purée texture, and finished with olive oil, giving the feel of eating something Italian. It was a clever approach that pulled the dessert toward a savoury, refreshing vegetable register.

130—130 / 136

The second dessert was the honey dessert of the Recollection chapter. The garnish, a cute model bee perched on a honeycomb shape, was fun. On top sat a hexagonal honeycomb tuile, made with the bitter aroma of black honey and herbs, giving a slightly sticky, caramelized impression. In the middle was a sponge cake lifted with the citrus flavour of sour honey, and breaking through the top revealed a mousse filled with cliff honey, harvested, it was said, from cliffs 3,000 meters up on the Tibetan plateau, lending a soft floral aroma.

112—112 / 136

Himalayan cliff honey is made by the world's largest honeybee, Apis laboriosa, and the harvesting itself is a life-risking task, famous for its "honey hunter" culture, an extremely scarce ingredient.

116—116 / 136

Breaking the wafer on top and tasting it, the texture was extremely moist and soft. What this dessert emphasized was that it used only Chinese honey and no sugar at all. The taste and aroma of honey were indeed dominant, yet it was not excessive or cloying like a dessert loaded with chocolate or a truckload of sugar, which I liked. The composition, layering bitterness, acidity, and floral notes through three honeys, was precise, and in drawing sweetness not from sugar but solely from the multilayered flavour of honey, you can read this house's philosophy of chasing "the essence of ingredients" even in dessert.

113—115 / 136

The last dessert was the heart of the Memory chapter. It is a recreation, in the form of petits fours, of Chef Jason Liu's childhood memories. Petits fours are something many restaurants finish with by simply setting out one of each kind of chocolate, and even two- and three-star places bring them on a cart at most; to dress even this far in concept and theme is truly remarkable.

118—118 / 136

A cart was brought, and at first I thought, "what is this?" A children's candy jar was full of what looked like sweets. Then the server opened a wooden box drawn with a childlike picture of Chef Jason Liu and scenes from his childhood. Inside a Chinese pouch was a coin reading LING LONG, and when told to drop it in (honestly, I thought dropping the coin would make a dessert appear), I did, and a music-box tune played. They had made "memory," not taste, the closing language of the course; for all the desserts I have eaten, this is a concept I have never encountered.

119—120 / 136

The four petits fours were made in the likeness of old nostalgic sweets and snacks. The first applied the flavour of bubblegum, thinly and hard glazed on the outside, fluffy within. The second placed ice cream between black sesame. The third applied a rabbit-shaped milk candy, drawing on White Rabbit (大白兔), the national candy born in Shanghai in 1959 that brings any Chinese person's childhood to mind, with white chocolate inside. The last, when you open the wrapper, reveals a yellow LING LONG lemon cake, set apart from the others by its prominent acidity. They were all sweet, but the final lemon cake was my favorite.

122—129 / 136

LING LONG is a restaurant that folds creativity, concept, theme, and performance into exactly the right places and nails the most important thing, taste, as well. Usually a strong concept means the food cannot keep up, and good food comes with a weak narrative, so LING LONG is rare in landing both at a high level at once. If more foreign foodies visit and its name spreads, I believe it can earn not only a top spot on Asia's 50 Best but a higher ranking than it now holds on the World's 50 Best as well.

134—135 / 136

It was the best not only of my Shanghai food journey but among all the fine dining I have experienced in other Asian countries, and it is a place I think worth coming to Shanghai for, for this one restaurant alone.

If Asian fine dining is to rise to a position of global leadership, I think LING LONG is showing what that looks like, and the direction it points.

121—121 / 136