Aged to Perfection

Just when it seemed that Shanghai had forgotten its past, visionary restaurants started updating traditions.

A gleaming glass elevator delivers us, Willy Wonka style, to the concrete labyrinth of bridges and ramps that makes up 1933, the 75-year-old Shanghai slaughterhouse that is reopening tonight and is set to include – what else? – the city’s latest high-end steak house. We’re greeted by David Laris, the diminutive, bald-headed celebrity chef who has worked in kitchens across Europe and Asia and who is leading the charge to revive this Art Deco masterpiece.

Laris, who is of Greek heritage and was born in Australia, arrived in Shanghai five years ago to help reinvent Three on the Bund, the sprawling neoclassical building (built in 1916 by the Union Assurance Company) that many credit for leading Shanghai’s revival of disused industrial spaces. “When I first came,” he says, “I thought I’d give it a year or two and see how it goes, but I became more and more inspired by what China was becoming and the potential that it has.” His eponymous restaurant, as well as four other restaurants (including a Jean Georges), anchors the building – redesigned by American architect Michael Graves – which also houses couture boutiques and the Shanghai Gallery of Art. The old abattoir, says Laris, “deserves to become something special. We have to allow it to live on in a new incarnation.”

Laris’ approach, of course, is not the norm here; the crane and bulldozer have been the symbols of Shanghai’s dramatic rise. But in contrast to the city’s long-held belief that the future requires scrapping the past, there is now a growing sense that Shanghai must move forward by reanimating what it has left behind. At the vanguard of this process are restaurants, capitalizing on a growing taste for the authentic and lending a spirit of vitality (renao) to a movement in architecture and design that’s radically changing the face of China’s largest city.

Richard Xavia is perched at the bar of Hamilton House, his new French brasserie, when I arrive. Shanghai, he says, “is in the midst of an artistic revolution. It happened before in Berlin in the 1920s, Paris in the ’60s and New York in the ’80s. Restaurants and bars are where this revolution gets played out.”