[Shanghai Secrets] Yes, There IS A Place to Get AMERICAN CHINESE FOOD

IMPORTANT NOTE: THE NEXT DATE FOR THIS IS... TOMORROW WEDNESDAY APRIL 29

Shanghai has been crying out for American Chinese food. Not crying out in the way that a city cries out for, say, running water, or functioning public transit, or any of the other things a city actually needs to function, but crying out in that very specific, low-key, totally-deniable way that expats cry out for things they are slightly embarrassed to admit they miss. The gloopy, neon-orange, fluorescent-lit, steam-table, mystery-protein American Chinese food that their parents used to order after little league. The stuff that was born in Chinese-American kitchens, evolved for a completely different continent, and has long since stopped pretending to be anything other than exactly what it is: Late-night food, big portions, zero ambiguity, the kind of crispy-saucy-savory reliability that your body files away after the first encounter and never stops requesting.

There have been rumors. There have been prayers. There have been the kind of solemn midnight WeChat voice messages sent to group chats that you hope no one screenshots.

It is over now. The nightmare is done. Because Matty Waters and the magnificent reprobates at Parlay have been running an American Chinese food pop-up once a month and we, your humble chroniclers of the Shanghai dining scene, are informing you of this now, approximately several months after it started, because that is what we do, and we are sorry, and also, you're welcome. Read on for some of the dishes they do, as well as our take (written by an AMERICAN with absolute authority on such matters).

Caption: Fried Rice (left): The load-bearing wall of American Chinese food. Every other dish on this list is a personality; fried rice is the infrastructure. Wok-tossed, slightly smoky, studded with peas and carrots and little cubes of egg that have been in there long enough to absorb everything good about the situation. You ordered it as a side. You will eat more of it than anything else on the table. This is not a prediction, it is a law. Chow Mein: Noodles, vegetables, sauce, the holy trinity of "I don't know exactly what's in this but I know exactly what it tastes like." Slightly crispy where the noodles hit the wok, slightly saucy everywhere else, a dish that has been feeding the American interior for 50 years under the quiet, confident assumption that nobody needs to ask too many questions. Nobody does. Nobody should. Order it alongside everything else and use it to mop up whatever sauce situation has developed on your plate. This is its purpose. It knows this.

Caption: Honey walnut shrimp: Plump, battered shrimp in a sauce that is technically mayonnaise-based and theoretically sounds insane but in practice tastes like someone found the precise overlap on the Venn diagram between "dessert" and "main course" and decided to just live there permanently. The walnuts are candied. Everything is a little sticky. It is objectively excessive and you will finish every last one.

The food is, according to our highly sophisticated critical apparatus, Panda Express adjacent. Not in a bad way. In the absolute best way. In the "you do not understand what they have achieved here" way. The orange chicken is doing things. The fried rice has made promises to your sodium receptors that it fully intends to keep. Whatever culinary dark arts they are practicing in the Parlay kitchen, the output is somewhere between a fever dream of a strip-mall in Topeka, Kansas and the Platonic ideal of a thing that was never real but that you have always, somehow, been chasing.

Caption: Broccoli beef: The one that got you through the lean years. Tender beef, glossy brown sauce, broccoli that has been gently cooked into submission until it absorbs enough of the surrounding gravy to justify its presence on the plate. This is the dish that American Chinese food invented so that you could tell yourself you ate a vegetable. You did not, really. But you did eat something great.

Here is the part that breaks the brain: Matty Watters is a Kansas BBQ man. This is his whole deal. Smoke, fire, meat, the American heartland, the whole aesthetic. And yet he has apparently cracked the code on a cuisine that hasn't yet gotten a foothold here yet. His secret? YouTube.

YouTube.

He learned it from YouTube.

Caption: Chinese spareribs: This one belongs to no nation and answers to no one. Parlay's BBQ pedigree (the smoke, the low-and-slow, the Kansas in their bones) collides head-on with a homemade char siu glaze, sweet and lacquered and deeply, unapologetically Chinese-American in spirit, and the result is something that food anthropologists would have a very difficult time classifying and that you will have a very difficult time stopping eating. Chinese spareribs doing what Chinese spareribs do, but finished with a sauce that Parlay made themselves, from scratch, because of course they did. Together the whole thing is doing something that probably doesn't have a name yet, something that only exists because one Kansas BBQ joint in Shanghai decided to run a once-a-month pop-up and apparently has no fear of consequences.

Caption: The Appetizer platter: Chinese spareribs, crab rangoon, char siu pork bao and apple pie dessert roles

This is somehow simultaneously the most and least surprising thing you could hear, and yet here we are, staring into the orange-lacquered abyss and wondering what it all means. The previous purveyors of American Chinese in this city, the dearly departed Chopsticks (RIP forever, you absolute legends), were two guys who had grown up watching their families run these joints stateside. They had the DNA. The generational memory. The aunties. Matty has heard the masses and an inexplicable gift and apparently the willingness to watch a truly staggering number of hours of how-to content, and the results are, by all available metrics, unhinged.

Once a month, Parlay. Go now. Go repeatedly so we don't loose this! The next one is TOMORROW, so scan the QR code and BOOK AT TABLE IN ADVANCE.

Deets:

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