Is vegetarian food easy to find in Shanghai?

Vegetarian food in Shanghai is easier to find than most visitors expect, and more complicated than they assume after a first meal.

The real vegetarian tradition

Start with the Buddhist restaurant, the su cai guan. It is not a matter of leaving the meat out: it is a separate old cuisine, built on wheat gluten, bean curd skin, dried bean curd sheets, mushrooms and vegetable stocks, with dishes sometimes shaped into meat-like forms, which is where mock chicken and mock duck come from. Temples and the restaurants around them are where this cooking is most concentrated, followed by the vegetarian chains. These kitchens do not buy meat at all.

One rule surprises people: by tradition the temple kitchen also avoids the five pungent vegetables, that is spring onion, garlic, chives, Chinese leek and asafoetida. The food is therefore unusually mild, sometimes sweet. That is the style, not a mistake.

The traps worth knowing

The vegetable is rarely the problem, the cooking is.

• The vegetable dish cooked in lard. Stir-fried greens and rice cakes often use animal fat.
• Stock is the commonest hidden animal ingredient in Chinese cooking. Soups, braised dishes and noodle soups usually come on chicken or pork bone stock.
• The tofu dish with minced pork. Mapo tofu and home-style tofu both carry it.
• Stir-fried greens with dried shrimp. Dried shrimp and shrimp skin are used in small amounts to lift savouriness.
• The salad with ham. Cold dishes often include slivers of ham.
• The noodle broth. Noodle and wonton soups almost always have a meat broth.
• The same dish differs between kitchens. What you learned in one restaurant does not carry to the next.

How to order, and what to say

In Chinese, no meat and vegetarian are not the same request. No meat sounds like a request to leave out the pieces, and the kitchen may agree while the dish is still cooked in lard and stock. The stronger phrasing is the vegetarian vow: I eat vegetarian, or more firmly, I am vegetarian, nothing from animals at all, followed by specific exclusions: no meat, no meat stock, no lard, no dried shrimp. Point at one dish and ask whether it contains meat or meat stock. The vow is better understood than a dietary label because it is old and unambiguous. Asking the kitchen to leave something out is normal and usually accepted, though the dish will taste simpler, and the request is easily missed when the kitchen is busy.

Where it works, and whether a strict vegan can manage

Buddhist restaurants and vegetarian chains are the easy option. International and hotel restaurants usually label vegetarian dishes clearly. Sichuan and Yunnan restaurants carry numerous vegetable dishes and are the best of the ordinary kitchens once the pork and lard are removed. Halal restaurants overlap only partly, since halal guarantees no pork and no alcohol but the cooking is still built on beef and mutton. Noodle and dumpling shops are the worst value, because the filling may be vegetarian while the broth is not.

A vegan has to read more carefully. Vegetarian has no settled meaning in a Chinese kitchen, and egg, dairy, oyster sauce, fish sauce and dried shrimp all appear in dishes sold as vegetarian, particularly oyster-sauce stir-fries and mock-meat dishes. A vegan must also accept shared woks and oil. Anyone with strict requirements should stay with vegetarian restaurants that state they use no egg and no dairy.

Shanghai is friendly to vegetarians, but the friendliness is not automatic. Ask every time, about the dish rather than the restaurant; avoid noodles, soups and anything braised in stock; treat vegetarian restaurants as the mainstay and vegetable dishes elsewhere as something to confirm. On that expectation a strict vegetarian eats well in Shanghai, but has to ask at every meal.