Szechuan food in Shanghai

Tonight we invited some of Stephen's friends to dinner at a big fancy Szechuan restaurant. We had our own private room. I let Stephen's friend Jason do most of the ordering. We ended up with about 2 or 3 times as much food as we could possibly eat. It was all very tasty. The final cost was about 830 RMB, which translates to less than $120.

We drank Tsingtao beer throughout. We started with some cold dishes. Some of the hot dishes that followed are shown below.

This is a spicy duck blood stew.

The brown bowl contains a spicy frog leg stew, and the white bowl contains long-stemmed mushrooms (not really seen much in the US) with some unknown green herb-like vegetable.

This is one of the cold dishes. I think it is duck meat with a (quail?) egg yolk inside.

This was a gigantic fish stew. The fish was extremely fresh and delicate.

Here is Stephen with his friends. We all first met Jason when we were in Wuhan in 2004; he was a university student who acted as an interpreter and guide for the "distinguished foreign mathematicians". Stephen kept his email, so it was a lucky coincidence when Stephen discovered that Jason was also living in Shanghai and had the same job as Stephen but in an American instead of Chinese architecture firm! Jason has provided invaluable assistance helping Stephen acclimate to life in Shanghai. The young women, two from Germany and one from Malaysia, are all studying business and/or Chinese at Tongji University.