Shanghai's New Sheen
By Mark Graham
The Shangri-La is on the eastern bank of the busy Huangpu River, which runs through the city. Next door is the Grand Hyatt Shanghai (88 Century Boulevard; 011-86-21-5049-1234; shanghai.grand.hyatt.com), the world's highest hotel, with rooms starting on the fifty-eighth floor; its eighty-seventh-floor lounge, Cloud 9, offers a giddy view across the bustling waterway toward the famous Bund promenade. The Grand Hyatt's $540 million shiny silver design was inspired by the lines of a traditional pagoda, but inside, it is ultramodern, with Minimalist room decor and full-length windows that provide extraordinary vistas of the packed urban landscape that an estimated 17 million to 20 million call home.
Shanghainese unblushingly boast that they are the most stylish, the most cultured and the most entrepreneurial of the 1.3 billion people in China. They are also rather proud of their city's past: during the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was known throughout the world as the Paris of the East, a rumbustious place of seductive movie stars, dodgy opium dens, Chinese gangsters, shady expatriate traders, high-society balls, White Russian aristocrats and grand European-style mansions.
When the Communists took over, in 1949, they eradicated the sleaze, snuffed out any trace of fun and commandeered the choicest buildings for the Party. In recent years, there has been a push to preserve and update those crumbling edifices, most notably Three on the Bund. Built by a British insurance company, it is now a lifestyle emporium with a branch of Giorgio Armani on the ground floor, a day spa, an art gallery and the farthest-flung outpost of the New York–based fusion maestro Jean-Georges Vongerichten, where the city's nouveau riche do not flinch at paying $93 a head for his tasting menu (Three on the Bund, Fourth Floor, 3 Zhong Shan Dong Yi Road; 011-86-21-6321- 7733; threeonthebund.com).
"I tell people that Shanghai is very much like New York, with lots of energy and lots of different things going on, hustling and bustling," says Vongerichten. "I have been coming here every three or four months for almost six years. It has changed so much. There is always something happening. It is fast — maybe too fast. Shanghai is catching up to the rest of the world's major cities."
The pride and joy of Shanghainese is Xintiandi, an area of once-dilapidated mid-19th-century shikumen houses (a style indigenous to the city) that has been given a face-lift so radical that it feels more like a film-set version of Old Shanghai than the real deal. It is a great place for wandering around — Chinese tour parties from the provinces are taken there to gawk at the novel (for them) sight of their well-off compatriots mingling freely with foreigners. The mostly international food at the Xintiandi restaurants is no great shakes. An exception is the fare at the authentic Yè Shanghai (338 Huangpi South Road; 011-86-21-6311-2323) and the Italian Va Bene (House 7 North Block, Xintiandi, 181 Taicang Road; 011-86-21-6311-2211), both replicas of successful Hong Kong ventures.
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