[Last Call] Salt Less Is Closing & I'm Still Thinking About The Rice

Last Calls are not our usual format for restaurants. Salt Less earned an exception. It's closing so read up so you know what you can get before they shutter.

Shanghai's vegetarian and vegan scene is real but modest... nothing like Hong Kong (unfortunately), where the options have critical mass. It exists here as a collection of places you find through people who already know, which is exactly how Salt Less reached us: a chain of recommendations, each one confident. We reached out. They wrote back to say they were closing on March 31. Damn.

We went anyway. Lunch with the general manager, the full-menu treatment, the story of how the place came to be. It was worth the trip, and worth one of these. Also, read till the end, there's a particular detail CNS readers won't want to miss.

What Is It?

Salt Less is lacto-ovo vegetarian restaurant, which means eggs and dairy appear when useful, but the menu runs mostly vegetarian/vegan in practice. The venue itself was previously Maison Papillion, a French restaurant, the owner converted it after a Buddhist awakening of sorts, and the bones of a certain kind of seriousness remained. This is not a smoothie bar that learned to cook.

The "health" designation is doing real work here, not just signaling. The kitchen runs genuinely low on salt and sugar, the name of the place is a statement of method, not branding – which means the flavors arriving at your table are quieter than you expect. Not timid. Quieter. The fresh corn soup tastes like corn pushed to its logical conclusion. The mushroom tastes like the platonic idea of mushroom. You adjust, and then you start to prefer it.

This does not describe the entire menu. The Kimchi Lasagna arrives with conviction. The laziji (deep-fried chicken cubes) makes no apologies. A critic skimming the menu might call it incoherent, Buddhist restraint beside Sichuan aggression, alongside Italian-Korean pasta concepts but that critic hasn't eaten here on a Tuesday lunch, watching the regulars order without looking at the menu, pulling from multiple cultural sides without apparent confusion. The restaurant knows what it is. The regulars know what they want. The incoherence is yours to let go of.

Market Fit

The plant-based dining landscape in this city has always been weirdly bifurcated. Down low, you have the Buddhist canteens and the neighborhood tofu spots, 40-80 yuan (US$5.8-11.6), perfectly good, sometimes loud and crowded, no ceremony. Up top, Fu He Hui doing the tasting menu theater for 600-plus, which is its own argument about what vegetables are worth. The middle, as with some things in Shanghai, is nearly empty. Duli holds that ground with urban-casual indifference. Both, I should say, are excellent institutions. In the mid-tier, Salt Less holds themselves differently however, white tablecloths, actual stemware, the legacy confidence of a restaurant that ran with a black pearl and doesn't need to explain itself, all for around 200 a head. Which, admittedly, there aren't too many white table cloth options for 200/pp.

The ratio feels almost transgressive. Reminiscent of the specific pleasure of those Azul brunches circa 2008, the ones where you handed over 118 yuan and walked out feeling like you'd gotten away with something. That sensation, value so obvious it borders on guilt, is rarer now, and harder to manufacture. Salt Less has it without trying.

Which is, in part, why losing it stings a bit.

So What's The Food Like?

The name is a promise, and the kitchen keeps it. You are not getting the piercing brightness of a Vietnamese kitchen here, nor the deep lacquered intensity of a French reduction. The flavors are gentle in a way that can, on first encounter, read as absence. The corn soup arrives and your first instinct is that something was forgotten. It wasn't. That sweetness is the corn. That's the whole point. It can be a borderline shock, when you think of how we may have been so conditioned to heavier hands of taste enhancers.

Spend enough time with the menu and two categories emerge, neither one a criticism: dishes that taste... healthy, and dishes that taste good. Sometimes those are the same dish. The kitchen isn't trying to trick you into vegetables or compensate for what it's left out. The ambition is more nuanced than that, and more specific: food that makes you feel better after eating it than you did before. At Salt Less, that turned out to be a reasonable thing to promise. Something, that I personally appreciated, given the fact that a heart event a few years ago, had doctor's demanding I decrease my salt and sugar intake. "Paradise has ended," a common refrain from sympathetic friends.

Let's dive in. First, some of the vegan options:

Let's start with the "Eel." Yes, that's the name of the dish. Shiitake mushrooms cut into ribbons, lightly battered and fried until they hold the shape and suggestion of the real thing, finished with saffron and chives and a reduced Shanghainese soy sauce for dipping. It is a dish that could easily tip into novelty and doesn't. The mushroom does the work.

The Season Feast (88 yuan) falls into the category of tastes healthy, which here is not a consolation. Turmeric cauliflower, roasted sweet potato, chickpea, the seasoning deliberately withheld so the roasting does the talking. It lands on a yogurt sesame peanut base that adds just enough weight to hold the thing together.

The Green Curry Mapo Tofu (128 yuan) sounds like a provocation and arrives as something gentler: Indian and Chinese in the same bowl, both turned down a register, the result more cohesive than the concept suggests. Apparently a reliable order for Shanghai's Indian vegetarian community, which is a reasonable endorsement.

The Black Truffle"Plants-energy" Fried Rice (88 yuan) is the dish you order twice. Once to eat, once to take home. The truffle earns the white tablecloths. The mushrooms come lightly pickled, which cuts against the richness in a way that keeps the dish moving. Quinoa roasted through and folded in adds a crunch that is quite satisfying. Green peas bring brightness at exactly the right moment. It comes with egg yolk but the menu flags it as adaptable for a vegan conversion, and losing the egg changes nothing essential. It travels well. Cold the next morning it is, genuinely, a good breakfast. Or heat it up if you like.

A brief pause for drinks, which deserve one.

The tea flights are the thing to order. Three cold, three hot, each built around a different variety. I tried three and cannot rank them, which is itself a recommendation. What you want depends on what you want. Look inward. Order accordingly. (68-78 yuan, each flight comes with a trio of drinks).

The Oyster (98 yuan) is Bombay Sapphire, sparkling wine, pineapple juice and a leaf you have probably never encountered. The oyster leaf is a coastal plant from North America, apparently rare, and the name is not metaphorical. Bite it and it tastes exactly like an oyster. Exactly. The pairing with the cocktail does not entirely make sense to me, and I am not sure it needs to. The drink is good on its own. The leaf is a party trick, but it is a genuinely impressive one, and watching someone experience it for the first time is its own small pleasure. Order it for that.

The Truffle (98 yuan) is the better drink and the one worth returning to. Gin, truffle infused olive oil, elderflower liqueur, grapefruit juice. It is refreshing in a way that the ingredient list does not predict. The olive oil is doing something real, not decorative. The alcohol is present but quiet enough that it reads as flavor rather than heat. This one earns its price.

Dairy & egg vegetarian options:

The Kimchi Lasagna (78 yuan) arrives with a disclaimer from the waiter: no tomato sauce. This is accurate and also undersells it. What you get is layers of pasta with kimchi cured gently enough that the ferment reads as nuance rather than punch, over a thyme-truffle cream that you will scrape to the edges and then scrape again. The salt reduction, which elsewhere on the menu can read as restraint, here produces something genuinely precise. This is a dish that rewards the kitchen's philosophy rather than despite it. I have ordered it twice.

The White Furu Spaghetti (58 yuan) is, as far as I can tell, an original. Furu is fermented tofu, the closest thing Chinese cuisine has to a soft spreadable cheese, and chronically underused outside of breakfast tables and the occasional congee accompaniment. It deserves a larger audience, particularly among the lactose intolerant, who have been making do with less interesting alternatives for too long. Here it becomes a sauce, rich and savory, met by a parmesan tuille you break at the table and fold in with a raw egg. The result is a bowl of pasta that you will not share. You may order a second. If you are trying to cut carbs, this restaurant is closing in weeks, so set that aside. At minimum, the dish will change how you look at the block of furu in your fridge and the packet of Barilla you haven't had a reason to open. Overall, a very good dish. Although, I might have swapped the spaghetti for fettucini. The Cantonese white furu sauce could have passed the dish for fettucini alfredo.

The Pan-Fried Mushrooms "Chicken Steak" Rice arrived at 68 yuan into a table that had run out of room. I managed a few pieces later at home, paired with Nando's sauce from the fridge, which is not the intended context but produced a positive result. The batter uses egg, which keeps it from a fully vegan designation, but the mushroom rice itself does the structural work convincingly.

My better half ate the rice. The feedback was "nice." They are Eastern European, so apply the appropriate feedback conversion rate.

Order the Laziji (88 yuan). Order it even without Chinese friends to guide you, provided you have a baseline tolerance for heat. It will not be the worst thing that happens to you, but fair warning to those of more delicate constitution.

A disclosure: I do not enjoy ma, the Sichuan numbing spice, which I find more disorienting than pleasurable. These devilish little peppercorns are strewn throughout. The kitchen however dialed them down to a level of restraint that I found palatable, which, for a committed ma skeptic is meaningful info. The kitchen has, however, dialed them back to a level I found manageable, which for a committed ma skeptic is meaningful information.

The chicken is reconstituted mushroom, firm enough that the substitution is not a compromise. Two types of pepper share the bowl. The long pepper are Lapizi peppers from Xingjiang and they are the ones to approach carefully, it will register on even a local palate, nibble first. The smaller, lighter red in color ring chopped chilis are a familiar sight: Huangfeihong. These little delights are no cause for fear, light, crunchy, not spicy at all. This dish, also ordered twice.

The Banana Parfait (38 yuan) sounds like something you skip, and the grey ribbon of sesame custard running through it does nothing to change that first impression. Skip nothing. Order this.

The miso cookie base is the reason. Miso is a salt-forward fermented paste, and what it does at the bottom of a dessert is exactly what salted caramel does, which is to say it makes the sweet things above it taste more like themselves. The banana keeps the whole thing light. The sesame custard and mascarpone pull in opposite directions, cool and rich, and land somewhere that makes sense. It is a better dessert than its description earns, which is a particular kind of achievement. Get it.

The matcha Dubai chocolate is a timely riff on the thing everyone is doing right now, made entirely in house, which already sets it apart. Pistachio swapped for matcha, sugar pulled back to the restaurant's usual register. It still reads as dessert.

So what should I get?

There were a ton of things that I enjoyed over the course of two visits, including several items not included in this piece. This is what I'll be ordering for myself, and my friend next time we go:

• Beet Root Fruit Tartar (not pictured, but good), 68 yuan
• Black Truffle"Plants-energy" Fried Rice, 88 yuan
• Laziji, 88 yuan
  
• Kimchi Lasagna, 78 yuan
  
• Furu Spaghetti, 58 yuan
  
• Banana Parfait, 38 yuan

Oh, and the cold Tea Trine flights. That'll be 194 yuan per person (with the discount), with enough to take home for breakfast the next day.

Reader Perks (The Detail Not to Be Missed):

For the remainder of this month, CNS readers get 20% off. Add Erin to make a reservation, and be sure to send her this article. She'll get you sorted on the discount.

One disclosure worth making: This piece was not paid for. We hear occasionally that some of what we write reads like it was. It isn't. We just like what we like, and we say so. If you've been, or you go before March 31, tell us what you ordered. We read the comments. =)

If you go...

Scan this QR code to make a reservation. Go down, Lane 149, Jiaozhou Rd. It will be No. 2.