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Twelve cafes in you should try in ShanghaiJoining the cafe hopping bandwagon because Shanghai is truly the place for it ...
01/10/2026

Twelve cafes in you should try in Shanghai

Joining the cafe hopping bandwagon because Shanghai is truly the place for it - it has the most coffee shops of any city in the world, with the last official count surpassing 10,336. Most of the best shops - those with small footprints, unique aesthetics, vibes and drinks etc. are run by rich hobbyists that just break even or even lose money. We salute you for your service and sacrifice.

For my Australian audience: a lot of what makes cafe hopping in Shanghai special goes far beyond just how good the coffee itself is (see above re vibes). Cafes typically stand out from one another with their ‘signature drinks’, which are about as diverse as they come, with the only commonality being that there is coffee in them in some way shape or form. Be prepared to be open to different expressions of coffee, even if you may consider some sacrilegious. For the mass Chinese, coffee is a lifestyle, not to get buzzed or something needing to nerd out over - there’s a reason why the vast majority don’t even open until 10am.

But of course, plenty of venues that will still appeal to the purists - there’s something for everyone.
I hope you enjoy the list! Sound off in the comments for any Qs.

Captain George 乔治队长
📌上海市徐汇区太原路236号

A cafe, a museum or an apothecary? Captain George feels like all three, and it’s big enough, calm enough and comfortable enough to stay for a long time as well as a good time. It’s one of the biggest cafes I visited on this trip, but in no way feels commercial. It’s the one in the list I’d recommend most for a first-timer.
It’s also one of the more serious coffee shops of those I visited. Founder George Peng won the 2025 World Brewers Cup repping China, so credentials? Check. Get the coffee tasting set to try three-in-one. Otherwise, pour-overs, tasting sets and a whole lot of roasts to choose from.

O.P.S. CAFE
📌上海市徐汇区太原路177弄1号临

Probably the most hyped cafe in Shanghai right now. Get here at least 15min before they open to be among the first to be let in (only 2ppl at a time), or be prepared to queue like you would in Tokyo. Seriously, the lines swell to 30+ deep less than half an hour after opening.

I say

Discuss...Can't wait to see the Melbourne version 😝
26/08/2026

Discuss...

Can't wait to see the Melbourne version 😝

23/08/2026

Sogumm means salt. Well ackshually, it’s ‘sogeum’ - but Changhoon ‘Kimi’ & Suhyun ‘Su’ Kim wanted an easier romanisation so fair’s fair. Anyway, you can be assured sodium levels are well-calibrated here, in no small part due to Kimi’s training under Jeong Kwan and to a lesser extent, Aria (yes, the Sydney one). Su is no slouch either with the likes of Alaine Ducasse Plaza Athénée & Restaurant André as stars on her resume.
Not every dish hit the same heights, but no dish felt gratuitous or out of character - well, except perhaps the galbi-jjim which had a surprisingly Chinese flavour profile, but that’s a one-off. Even the small bites - the cool, jiggly-wobbly pile of dotori-muk, the vegetal, foresty gang-doenjang bibimbap and the lively seafood bibim guksu - hit as hard as the actual big boy dishes.

Imo, this is Sogumm’s strength: a deft hand without deafening flavour. Dishes absolutely do punch (helloooo artichoke), but the kitchen also knows when to leave well enough alone. And of course, everything tastes of its ingredients. That’s the kind of Korean cooking I’ve grown to love. Salt by name, but refreshingly little over-seasoning of the idea itself.

Jerusalem artichoke gangjeong ✅
Pa-dak sanjeok ☑️
Dotori-muk ✅
Seafood kimchi jeon ☑️
Gang-doenjang bibimbap ☑️
Wagyu-yukhoe bibimbap ✅
Seafood bibim guksu ☑️
Gomtang ✅✅
Premium wagyu brisket galbi-jjim
Lotus leaf bossam ✅

Visited 3 Aug 2026. 1 visit, $75pp.

19/08/2026

Dining at Zareh reveals the pitiful depths of my knowledge, but also gives rise to celebrate the learning that inevitably comes with immersion in the new. Armenian, Egyptian, Lebanese - all enormous blind spots in my field of view, which makes Tom Sarafian’s cooking feel so incredibly fresh to me. Melbourne clearly feels the same, given how difficult it is to book, though I suppose it doesn’t hurt that it also recently won GT’s restaurant of the year alongside the Age’s highest accolade - Sarafian’s collecting these awards like his dishes collect ticks from yours truly.

It's a personal thing for Sarafian: Zareh was his paternal grandfather. In that tribute lies the passion and confidence behind a menu that doesn't even try to explain itself to you (rest assured: the waitstaff do just that if asked). Just order, and you'll end up somewhere good in Central Asia/Middle East - really good. It’s not fine dining - I don’t think I’ve experienced what that could look like for this kind of cooking, but the food is so complete that I don’t feel like it needs any further ‘elevation’ or ‘refinement’. Well, okay, maybe the individually de-leaved brussel sprouts accompanying the coral trout fish skewer is a little excessive, but it makes a difference, like with any other deliberate decision taken in the kitchen.

Anyway, I don’t want to sweat the details - it’s awesome, generously seasoned food, kissed by fire and does a beautiful job shining a bright light on this type of cuisine. If there are more restaurants cooking across these Armenian-Egyptian-Lebanese intersections with this much personality (Aalia & Aambra in Sydney come to mind), I clearly have homework to do.

Super gilda
Torshi bandari☑️
Bastourma toast ☑️
Beets & shanklish ✅
Kafta nayyeh, radishes, fried saj bread ✅
Batata harra ☑️
Chicken kebab, toum, pickled green chilli ✅✅
Hummus, king prawns, spanner crab + aish baladi ✅
Fish shish kebab, brussel sprouts, taratoor
Leeks bi laban ☑️
Quince gatnabour ☑️
Chocolate orange blossom sundae ✅

Visited 31 July 2026. 1 visit, $80pp.

14/08/2026

Bathers’ Pavilion is at it again with its now-famous international restaurant residency program, this year with 3 Michelin-starred Singlethread headlining. These first started with Simon Rogan’s L’Enclume taking over the Pavilion’s kitchens in 2023, which ended up being one of my favourite meals of that year. However, the 2025 rendition never achieved the same alchemy and thus left quite little behind except for the $650pp price tag (ex-drinks). This, along with having already heard quite many murmurings of mediocrity about Singlethread’s residency - which appear to be at least indirectly corroborated by the fact that seatings are still available to book even now - expectations were basically underwater.

But as I’ve said time and time again, expectations management is a huge part of how we perceive and remember most experiences, with dining no exception. Singlethread single-handedly (single-threadedly??) put those expectations into their ibushi gin donabe and smoked them. 

Kyle Connaughton’s and the Bathers’ teams have come together to produce a processing of dishes with remarkably few loose threads, from the very start with a seafood still life (a la hassun) of appetisers all the way to the very end with the honey entremet & beeswax gelato. I also appreciated that much of the produce was grown specifically for the residency at the Bathers’ Southern Highlands farm Rotherwood, a local translation of the farm-restaurant symbiosis that defines SingleThread in California. That all the crockery and tableware was made specifically for the residency adds to the sense of something bespoke - and goes someway towards justifying the $760 per head you’re paying (this all assumes you value these things). Yes, the meal isn’t criticism-proof - nor should a $760 dinner be - feel free to ask in the comments as I’m running out of character count. But unlike 2025 L’Enclume, I did not leave this residency with buyer’s remorse, and in fact have enough conviction to avidly disagree with the harsher takes I’ve heard. Consider this your nudge off the fence if you were on it like I was. 

Visited 8 Aug 2026. 1 visit, $760pp.

10/08/2026

To think that I’d fly all the way to Melbourne to spend a long weekend and with my scarce meal slots, use up two of them on a restaurant that’s known for serving beef and water. And yet…Gaon was one of the restaurants I thought about most after leaving.

Yes, the soups are tasty. Really, bloody excellent even. You’d expect as much once you see Michael Kim’s CV and the 240L gamasot, where some broths cook for up to twenty hours. Of course they’re going to be good. At this level, they are nourishing balms for stomach and soul - literally in the sense of Korean food being seen as medicine for the body. It’s the kind of thing that makes a cold Melbourne day feel ever slightly less hostile. The kind of restorative that could keep at bay a wintry chill that would ordinarily seep right into your bones. And I won’t even have room in this caption to talk about all the non-soup dishes, other than to say you’re only skimming the top of the gamasots if you don’t order them - especially that sleeper baechujeon.

The room has that small (~40 seats), family-like (nephews help out), chef-driven energy. There’s often a queue outside, in a nondescript bit of Carnegie that hardly screams ‘destination restaurant’. And that’s probably what makes Gaon feel like the real deal. Kim spent years honing his experience at the CIA and cooking at various places overseas, then left hospitality for around 15 years before coming back to open Gaon on his own terms. There’s no sense of deliberately chasing trends here (though you could definitely say Gaon has landed at the right time to ride the Korean wave). It’s just a very clear idea of what food should do: warm you, feed you properly, and make you want to come back. The fact that I did twice should say everything really. Gaon is an absolute must.

Gomtang (clear beef) ✅✅
Galbitang (short rib) ✅✅
Ganjang gejang (soy marinated raw crab) ✅✅
Seolleongtang (milky ox bone) ✅
Spicy market style beef soup ✅
Doganitang (beef tendon) ✅
Eel soup ☑️
Baechujeon (fried cabbage pancake) ✅ 
Eonyang Bulgogi ✅
LA-style kalbi ✅
Charcoal-Grilled Spicy Beef Tripe & Tendon ✅
Japchae fried mandu 

Visi

05/08/2026

Look I know how this'll land. 150% of Sydney's median weekly rent on ONE meal. Value? Get outta here. You know as well as I do that this is an extreme that'll break any equation thrown at it to try and justify it to yourself. It's giving ‘I'll save $6k flying to Girona by spending $1.25k here’ boy maths energy - you and I both know how that sounds.

And so I'm not going to justify it to you at all. Considering it's a one off, I also don't need to. But our subjective reality is exactly what I said in the reel, this is unparalleled gastronomy that Sydney so very, very rarely sees. It requires commensurate (lack of) economies of scale flying in one of the world's most celebrated chefs to develop - from scratch no less - a series of dishes that will never be repeated, for one night only. It was always going to be hard to price that in (maybe r/wsb could try). I wouldn't be surprised if there was no profit margin at all.

One issue that I can't forgive is that there simply wasn't enough food - we could have eaten the entire menu a second time over (discounting the unusual appetites of the ISH crew, there still could have been 3-4 more dishes) and indeed, we had to make do with burgers & fries after. Maybe it's the ozempic pandemic bringing down the average amount per plate but damn, those of us still unafraid to actually appreciate food do suffer for it.

Nonetheless, I've got to try and conclude this word salad somehow. Yes it's expensive. Yes it was excellent. No it wasn't filling. No I had no regrets. I might even do it again - if you threw in a Saint Peter tuna cheeseburger at the end 👀

Visited 29 July 2026. $1250pp (food only; *total cost $2000pp with the most expensive drink pairing).

28/07/2026

*I doubt gramps or anyone in his generation would have understood Grandfathers, but I think I do. The Pellegrino 2000/Clam Bar trio never set out to open an authentic Chinese restaurant - which seems to be the nonexistent hole at which all the negative reviews have been poking. BUT, it is recognisably Chinese (not just Chinese-inspired), which then unavoidably invites comparisons to ‘proper’ Chinese restaurants anyway. There must also be a certain kind of dissonance, particularly for Cantonese enthusiasts to see so many live fish tanks, yet without a single thing you can actually point to and say ‘I want that’ (dragon-blood peacock cichlids, for those wondering). Add in a ‘Western’ benchmark level of service, all ensconced in one of the best interiors of any restaurant I’ve visited in awhile and yeah, I can understand where the polarisation comes from.

And yes - apparently the early cooking was pretty crap, again based on the average age of most negative reviews. Yes, none of the dishes here are ‘better’ than the classics, but again, I really think this is besides the point. The cooking is clean enough, refined enough, evokes enough familiarity for those that have a connection to the cuisine, and it’s easily a bloody good time (there’s a heck of a w**e list too). At around $120pp - a price that included a live seafood dish no less - it certainly didn’t break the bank either. Of course, you can go cheaper - you can always go cheaper. But you can’t go cheaper for a whole-of-package experience like the one a night out at Grandfather’s will give you. Sorry gramps.

All of this is to say, Grandfather’s is a genuinely rock solid time, because it understands its value offering and has had the time to hone it over the nine or so months it’s been open. 

Visited 17 July 2026. 1 visit. $120pp.

23/07/2026

The idea behind Getsushi comes from Narito Ishii, Sydney's most famous fishmonger. For him, Getsushi is the ideal vehicle to showcase (mostly) Australian seafood, in a more straightforward, unadulterated manner. Pieces like the latchet, red spot whiting & greater amberjack were stellar examples on this particular visit (in fact the white fish really hit), with an alpine salmon (salmon! Of all things!) being a highlight. 

This ‘showcase the fish’ philosophy is channelled through the hands of two chefs - Fuka san and Ueda san. Ueda - who we had on this occasion - is from Hokkaido with 40 years of sushi making experience. If he looks familiar, it might be because he was working the counter at Gold Class Daruma before joining Getsushi. It's a small world of sushi in Sydney 😂

At $160, value for money is high, though you'll have to accept potential quality variation depending on the chef you get. And as usual, I'm not going to wax lyrical like all the other influencers out there - not every piece will be amazing and there are definitely misses. But it's a punt worth taking at least once for the upside that's in store. 

Visited 14 July 2026. 1 visit. $160pp.

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