Shanghai for first-time visitors

Best restaurants

Shanghai eats around the clock, and the menu's geography is as wide as the city's streets. The twelve below are not crowd-sourced averages — they are restaurants this editor sends visitors to, ordered by how often the recommendation pays off. Turkish counters off the city's main shopping spines, Sichuan and Northwest grills in the same downtown blocks as a Japanese ramen counter in a mall, a Spanish-run dining room near the river, a blues-and-jazz club that opens its kitchen in the late afternoon and runs into the small hours, a Mexican kitchen that opens only on weekends and is the better for it. Addresses, hours, and phone numbers are pulled from OpenStreetMap; the editorial judgements are opinion. Use both. None of these reward queueing outside the brand-extension franchises the airport gift shop is pushing this season.