[Decades Club] Rob Jameson: 20 Years Inside Shanghai F&B

Shanghai restaurants open, close and reinvent themselves at a dizzying pace. Twenty years of working in the industry makes you something of a war historian.

Rob Jameson arrived from the UK in 2006 and has worked at some of the city's most talked-about restaurants since – M on the Bund, Maya, The Nest, The Cannery, and now Homeslice. Here, he looks back on the restaurants, the city, and the life he made here along the way.

CNS: What were you up to before coming to Shanghai? You began your career at Mezzo in London, which was one of Europe's biggest restaurants at the time. What was that like?

Rob: Brutal. I started there at 17 as a runner, carrying giant trays through this massive two-floor restaurant doing something like 2,000 covers a day. The chef was John Torode, who later became a judge on MasterChef.

The kitchen was intense, almost militaristic. We weren't allowed to talk while working. Double shifts, totally exhausted. My feet were wrecked, blistered. The chefs would go mental if someone broke a dish.

But I loved it. I worked my way up from runner to waiter and learned very quickly what hospitality at a high level looks like. Starting from the bottom also gave me huge respect for restaurant staff, and that's stayed with me throughout my career.

CNS: So, how'd you get your start in Shanghai?

Rob: I came here when I was 28. After university, I worked my way up in hospitality in London, then spent two years doing VSO volunteer work in Vietnam, followed by a few months in Calcutta. I knew I wanted to stay in Asia long-term. I'd visited Beijing once, travelling alone in the snow, and found it raw and fascinating.

I applied to one restaurant in Shanghai that made me go through four rounds of interviews and then went quiet. So I wrote to M on the Bund, interviewed with Michelle Garnaut in Hong Kong, and immediately got a job with them. When the other place came around to give me an offer, I'd already accepted Michelle's. So that was it.

CNS: What were your first impressions of the city?

Rob: The scale of it – the tall buildings, those massive ships moving down the Huangpu. But what really stuck with me was the street life. The smells, the noise, the stinky tofu on the pavement, which honestly you don't smell as much anymore. There was this organization but also this raw energy everywhere, at all hours. Noise, bustle, people outside all the time. Some people found that annoying. I loved it. I think it shows life. That's probably one of the reasons I stayed in Shanghai.

CNS: M on the Bund has become one of those names that belongs to Shanghai mythology now. What was it like working there?

Rob: Intense. Challenging… but incredible.

Michelle Garnaut was intensely creative. She could be a real micromanager. The literary festival she built there was something else. She wasn't inviting soft choices: we're talking Martin Jacques, John Ralston Saul, Kishore Mahbubani, Gore Vidal – economists and philosophers who were predicting the future world order, basically, to a fairly small audience in Shanghai. A lot of what they said has actually come to pass. I read their books because of that job.

My role was HR and training, which is a strange position – staff see you as management, management sees you as staff, so you're often mediating alone in the middle. But what I remember most is how hungry people were. Staff would come into interviews and, unprompted, say they wanted to learn English. They genuinely believed it could change their lives and create opportunities. They saw how fast China was moving and they wanted to move with it. I was actually thinking recently that I hear that kind of thing a lot less now.

CNS: You also learned Chinese early on, right?

Rob: Yeah, I did an intensive Chinese course when I first arrived. Honestly, I think if you're going to live in another country, you should try to learn the language. Even if you're only staying two years. And especially in restaurants – language helps you understand the culture, the customers and your staff. A lot of my Chinese came just from speaking with staff every day.

CNS: After M on the Bund came Maya, which a lot of people still talk about as one of Shanghai's defining restaurants of that time. How'd you end up there?

Rob: Through Tomer, my friend who ran the Thai boxing gym Oz Bodyfit. We'd bonded over vinyl records. I'd reached out to him and gone over to his place with records, and we just clicked over music. He introduced me to Miguel and the partners at Maya and Velvet Lounge, and they offered me the GM position. The restaurant had literally just opened, and it was already very popular.

Maya was fantastic. Honestly, those were probably the golden years of Shanghai F&B for me. Eight and a half years there. It was a fantastic experience. I really enjoyed working there. The atmosphere, the food – it just pops. The music – it's full of energy. Everybody who went there just loved it.

And Shanghai at that time was just buzzing. 2009 to around 2014 – restaurants were packed, people were spending money. We were doing serious cocktails with more high-end dining, and there weren't that many restaurants then doing that. I know it sounds weird now, but yeah. We were probably one of the first restaurants to start introducing mezcal, too. At that time, most people didn't even know what mezcal was.

Miguel and I were hand-carrying bottles back from Mexico because you couldn't really import it properly yet. I remember coming through customs with something like 14 bottles stuffed into my suitcase, feeling really nervous. But then we'd get them through and line them all up behind the bar. It was a lot of fun – good stuff.

CNS: What did you learn from your time there – "takeaways," if you will?

Rob: Something that Brad Turley, the chef, taught me about hospitality was… So usually, what I had seen before that was that chefs kind of stayed hidden in the kitchen. Brad was out on the floor talking to guests, giving people drinks, entertaining the customers. So basically, restaurants are just as much about atmosphere as the food; people like to feel that they're part of something.

And I mean, obviously, you have situations with customers sometimes, and you've got to learn how to deal with these things. I've had people getting on tables and trying to get them down and then altercations happen. And when Maya first opened, you could still smoke inside restaurants back then, which is crazy to think. Then suddenly you couldn't, so people would drift out to this corridor of the building to smoke, then later in this little lounge area where we had a pool table. It was technically still indoors. And eventually, we had to push them out. But yeah, those were the times.

One time I said "see you later" to some customers as they left. And later, we got a one-star review on Dianping, saying something like "How dare the manager speak Japanese to us." They thought I'd said "sayonara" and got offended. So I ended up getting hold of them to explain that wasn't what I'd said at all. But these things happen. We cleared it up.

CNS: A lot of long-term transplants describe that time as "the golden era of Shanghai." What made it feel that way?

Rob: There were just far fewer venues, so everyone converged on the same places socially. If a restaurant was good, it's like the whole city ended up there. Maya won Restaurant of the Year two years running. Yongkang Road was packed. Maoming Road was buzzing. Restaurants were full every night.

Like for the 2010 World Cup, we hosted games; the whole team dressed in Mexican football kits, Kahlúa was the sponsor, the place was absolutely packed. It was a very exciting time.

CNS: Where'd you end up after a shift?

I'd finish a shift and head to Shelter late at night and run into chefs, artists, DJs, finance guys, people who accidentally stayed out for two days. Shelter was a big part of my life then, just popping in on the way home, bumping into people you know, listening to music, then heading home. I've apologized to my wife for a few late nights there.

Dragon Club was another one: this tiny underground room, really good sound, Japanese DJs playing vinyl until 10 or 11am. You keep going and going and going, and then you see the light of day, and you're like, oh my God.

When you work in F&B, you don't get into your night until 2am or so. Most people are winding down when you're just starting. So "after-hours" places like that mattered to that community.

CNS: You later moved to The Nest and The Cannery, which represented a very different era of Shanghai dining.

Rob: Yeah, from 2017 to 2019. As an F&B Director, as they say. Although I don't like that word. Director. By then, the industry had changed massively. Nest and The Cannery were very sophisticated operations. Amazing design, serious cocktail programs, really smart promotions.

Mark, the owner, had a real gift for coming up with great F&B ideas. Earlier on, if your restaurant was good, people just came. Maybe you did a happy hour. By the time Nest and Cannery came around, restaurants had to work much harder with promotions. DJs. Tuesday Oyster nights. Special brunches. Collaborations.

Then social media changed things a lot with KOLs and delivery platforms and this constant pressure to stay visible. I remember the old Sherpa's days when delivery orders literally arrived by fax machine. If the fax machine ran out of paper, we'd have customers ringing and asking where their food was, or the delivery guy would show up and we'd be like, "what?" Nowadays, people seem more reliant on delivery apps and seem to be less spontaneous socially.

Didi, too. I refused to download it for about three years. And the shared bikes – five years before I got on one of those. I was stubborn.

CNS: Why the resistance?

Rob: I genuinely loved the old Shanghai taxi experience. In the early days all the drivers were Shanghainese, all driving Santanas – those old VW sedans – and they all had numbered plates, a system from when licenses were limited and controlled. If someone had three digits on their plate, you knew they were old school.

We used to call taxis for our customers who had been drinking, to get them home. Suddenly nobody could get a cab because everyone had switched to these apps. You'd stand outside watching taxis drive past with green lights on but nobody stopping. It was really frustrating.

CNS: You now work with Homeslice, another Shanghai institution in its own way.

Rob: What I liked about Homeslice immediately was that it had integrity. Every place I've ever worked, I've genuinely believed in the food and drink. If I didn't respect the product, I couldn't do the job. And Nat, the founder, has this entrepreneurial energy that keeps things exciting. He's always thinking about the next idea, the next opening, the next improvement. It gives you excitement and purpose and energy.

Also, I still genuinely enjoy customer interaction. I love being on the floor, talking to guests, telling people about the products, making them happy. It's my favorite thing.

CNS: You've been doing volunteer work with Baoji Xinxing Aid for years. How did that start?

Rob: I'd worked with children living on the streets in Vietnam and then in Calcutta with my uncle. When you do that kind of work, you don't forget it. You can't just switch it off. Baoji Xinxing has centers that help kids in crisis: runaways, kids who'd end up stranded at train stations, kids who were kidnapped. The organization gives them a bed, shelters them, and brings them to a hospital for medical aid. The ultimate idea is to reunite them with their family if it's safe to do so. I've taken my daughter Emma with me before to meet some of the kids.

CNS: What does your life in Shanghai look like now?

Rob: I'm in Qingpu, which I love. Quieter, more family-oriented, nice restaurants. I pick Emma up from school twice a week. I do yoga at a place nearby called Mahashiva that has Indian instructors and it's more spiritual-focused.

I recently started playing volleyball again at the German school – haven't done that since university. Golf with friends. I take the subway into work, and I often stay a bit late and then head home. The F&B industry is very stressful, and it's 24-7. You're working on your day off all the time. My hair is not as non-grey as it used to be.

My family's also been doing more road trips around China – Guizhou, Hubei, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi, the Three Gorges. It's incredible. I've lived here 20 years, and China keeps making me feel like I know nothing about it.

CNS: And what about your Shanghai love story – how'd you meet your wife Julia?

Rob: We met at the swimming pool of Mandarin City. I was reading The Collapse of Globalization by John Ralston Saul, who spoke at the literary festival.

CNS: Did she see that book and think "hot?"

Rob: No, I think she just maybe saw a laowai reading a book and thought, that's interesting. But that was before social media, right? No one was looking at their phone all day. So we're at this pool and it started raining, and she was under an umbrella on a sunbed. There I was with my book, and I was like, where the hell do I go? Suddenly she said, "Oh, you can come under here." So, she spoke to me! Maybe she saw me looking at her before that.

We exchanged numbers. I remember as I left, I went over to the bar and said to the bartender, "Can you send some ice cream to that woman there?"

CNS: Smooth. So where do you eat and drink nowadays?

Rob: I've been going to Smoking Bowl lately because it's healthier, and the flavors scratch that itch I have for Mexican food. Klay sometimes; I like Indian food, of course. Parlay for the atmosphere. Senator Saloon for a drink, or Beer Plus in Gubei. I really like the staff there. Sapar, the Xinjiang restaurant. For coffee, Fumi, Slab Town, Tequila Coffee.

There's a beef soup restaurant in my neighborhood in Qingpu that's amazing. It's like the spine of the beef, and it's just a simple broth, but it is unbelievable. It tastes so good; it has good gelatin and fat content, for 32 yuan – it's nuts.

CNS: Last one. What's keeping you busy these days?

Rob: Homeslice! I want to mention that if people haven't had our pizza in-store yet, it's another level or two up from what they may have ordered online, as it's eaten closer to production.

We recently added new items at Homeslice Kitchen in Shankangli, plus new cocktails and new wines, including some of the best value-for-money wines that you can find anywhere in Shanghai. The new food is basically American-Italian dishes, like spinach and mushroom lasagna and mac and cheese, which we make with evaporated milk and two types of cheddar. Our other locations in Xujiahui, which was just renovated, and in Pudong have also recently launched new dishes to accompany pizza.

Plus, we've got the ongoing Detroit Pizza Night that normally runs the last Wednesday of every month, which is getting more and more popular and selling out.

CNS: Anything you'd like to plug? The floor is yours.

Rob: Homeslice! So we've got new menu items at our Shankangli location, including new cocktails and new wines, including some of the best value-for-money wines that you can find anywhere in Shanghai. The new food is basically American-Italian dishes, like spinach and mushroom lasagna and mac and cheese, which we make with evaporated milk and two types of cheddar.

Also, I want to mention that if people haven't had our pizza in-store yet, it's another level or two up from what they may have ordered online. Plus, we have the limited-edition Detroit pizza one night a month, which is getting more and more popular and selling out.

If you go

Homeslice Kitchen (Jing'an)

No. 3, Shankang Li, 358 Kangding Road

陕康里3号楼, 康定路358号