Down Boulevard de Montigny

We’re to meet for dumplings.  It’s Huadong and so they’re unlikely to be especially memorable or evocative of Qilu xianr.  But my friends have good taste and if they’ve chosen the place,  so who am I to act provincial.  

Walking south on Tibet Road, which means I must cross up over onto the walkway at Yanan East Road.  All these streets had different names before Liberation.  The predictable naming of streets for provinces and streets for revolutionary redoubts sags uninspiring as the decades wear on.  The imperative to sanitise was certainly legitimate.  But flat, and uninspired execution. 

I had a look and it would certainly be even more ridiculous, were I to note that I were walking down Boulevard de Montigny and joining the pedestrians up and over Eduard VII, Avenue as might have been the case in 1936.  (I wonder if the Japanese took a hand at renaming things the next year when they ran the show?) The naming all feels hurried and scarred over. Street names should accrue organically like Princes Mansion Well, in the capital.  Just look at the beautiful, “organic” naming system in Manhattan where some else, no doubt also in a rush, managed to name two hundred plus streets with one sweeping hand gesture.  The difference is that nothing except farmland to my knowledge was removed to make way for the grid.  In Shanghai an existing urban core was overtly reclaimed.  Yes. Well trodden.  Sour grapes from another century.  This is Xizang Lu. 

I get a text as I come up upon the crossroads where the dumpling place is supposed to be:  “We’re at a Korean barbecue”  My friends are not Korean, but damn if the last four times we’ve hung out we haven’t wound up in one bulgogi place or another. 

There is a Dong Bei restaurant on the first floor.  I have been to this establishment before in another location here in Puxi.  I used to think that was rather special, but now I realize it is merely a chain and the things I found authentic were mass produced.  Their dumplings weren't any good either, I'm now remembering.   I text a bit, lost, and my friend comes down to meet me. 

I’m noticing that it all feels rather like dining in Tokyo.  There are restaurants on the ground floor of course, but generally you head up into malls and find some place inside that has only a thin light to advertise it outside.  We move past the shuttered clothing stores to a boisterous environment of hanging fan nozzles and grizzling beef.  I have some of the oyster pancake and don’t-mind-if-I-do pour from the shared Tsingdao bottle.  I’m introduced to two young ladies from Taiwan and suddenly we’re talking about families that left this city, back in 1949.  Families who would have told you were were dining on Montigny Boulevard. 

Sunday, 10/22/17