Two American expats founded a restaurant in Shanghai in 2014. They called it the Fortune Cookie. It served chow mein, egg foo young, hot-and-sour soup, and, naturally, fortune cookies. You cannot get these things at any other restaurant in Shanghai. According to my American expat friend who lives in the neighborhood, it wasn’t very good, and she strongly discouraged me from eating there when I went to visit her.
Likewise, the grilled sliced tenderloin looked complicated and elaborate—bunches of lemongrass, hearts of palm, and scallion bundled in slices of dried, thin-sliced beef reminiscent of a bland pastrami, all dolloped with some sort of gelatin that made it appear that the plate was staring back at us with googly reddish-brown eyes—but it tasted friendly and familiar. So did the jumbo lump blue crabmeat entree, although it required some assembly, or, rather, it required us to figure out how to mix up the curry and the noodles. The house special, Khun Sompit’s Big Fish—named for cofounder Sam Rattanopas’s father, who, according to the website, “hails from the southern, coastal Thailand town of Nakorn Srithummaraj” another inspiration for the restaurant’s name—is a whole branzino, salty and crispy on the outside, tender on the inside. It too stared up at us from the plate.
