Ting

Shanghai

The dishes

Diving Flag: Hamachi, watermelon, horseradish sour cream

Getting Ready: Air Tank (foie gras, pork neck, pickle); Fins (softshell turtle skirt, water bamboo); Mask (jellyfish, crab, celtuce, dailon Thai chili-lime sauce)

Descent: Uni, white bean purée, croutons, fox nuts, clam foam)

Squid Says HI! (squid, fish mousse, ham, gremolata, corn-saffron sauce and stracciatella)

Hands Up!: Lobster, lobster ravioli, lobster bisque, almond foam

Coral Garden: Amadai crispy scales, shiso, yuzu cream sauce

Baby Shark: Duck consommé, scallop mousse

Chasing Turtle: Uruguay M9 Wagyu, Sichuan green pepper sauce, zucchini

Safety Stop: Seaweed foam, honeydew juice, watermelom

Ride The Waves: peach nectarine lemon vervain

There is an explosion of talent awaiting you at Ting in Shanghai. It’s a stylized, ideal cross of Taian Table and Ultraviolet, two three star Michelin eateries that made Shanghai famous in their time (Ultraviolet is no longer among us): if you know, you know. All that notwithstanding, the husband-and-wife owners Frédéric Jaros and Xinxin have created something special, where the food is good and fun at the same time: it’s not an easy achievement, so congratulations to them both. With their small chef’s table-only restaurant, which is also fixed menu-only, the pair work closely together and take you on a culinary journey that is part theatre and part journey down (their) memory lanes. And it works.

Chef Frédéric has innate talent, and quite the resumé to back it up. Montréal-born (a foodie-guarantee right there, given it’s the gastronomic capital of Canada), he moved to Italy to empower himself in the world of Michelin stars (at the time Michelin was not yet taking its act to Canada). If you’re a chef, moving to Italy is really a no-brainer proposition, but there are Italian restaurants and then there are Italian restaurants. Believe it or not, they are not all good and not all are the treasure-trove of carefully sourced ingredients and precise culinary transformations tall-tales will have you believe. But with Jaros, no such problem: he rally trained and worked at two of the best, by far, Italian restaurants there are: both not just stellar, but truly ground-breaking. And stellar is the world: Contraste in Milan is a one-star eatery that for many in the know is simply the best restaurant in Milan (and stars be damned) and from there he moved to Shanghai to become the pastry chef at Da Vittorio, a two-star eatery that probably deserves three. “Already at Contraste I was drawn to pastry: I saw it as art beyond the plate”, smiles Jaros, “… and I was lucky because there I was trained by a consultant who was also the pastry chef of Da Vittorio”. After five years at da Vittorio, he was ready to go solo, and did he ever: Ting, the Chinese logo of which resembles the initials (‘FJ’) of his name, is really something else. Given that he believes that food is the ultimate vehicle for memory and emotion, he wants each menu to express a mood, a feeling, a story. At TING, the menu changes four times a year along with the seasons, and each tells its own story: one was in honour of the Chinese Year of the Horse and a horseback vacation, another about his childhood memories back in Québec at the cabanne aux sucre (maple sugar shacks), another a day spent hiking in Huangshan, another devoted to winter and the winter Olympics. The menu I write about in this report, n.8 in the series, was devoted to diving and ocean vacations: this time the memory was that in a seaside resort in the Philippines where he proposed to Xinxin. The food and the setting at TING make for an interactive event; Frédéric pciks the theme and brings it to life on each plate,, Xinxin does the storytelling, bringing each dish to life through the stories attached to each.

The food really does tell a story at TING, and in the case of most of the dishes, it’s all so good you really want to listen to their story. The first stop on the menu Diving Flag, a curious mix of hamachi, watermelon, and horseradish sour cream, works better than expected, with the sweetness of the cream lifted by the freshness of the watermelon and neither of the two overpowering the hamachi. Not just good, but pretty to look at : the dish does remind you of the red and white striped flag that divers have to keep nboobbiong ont e surface so that other motorboats don’t venture in the area where they are swimming and risk serious harm. Even cuter is the Getting Ready, with air tank, fins, and mask all of which looked the part save for the mask, that didn’t remind me at all of a that diver’s gear (even though there was a little squirt of something that drew a small mask, I think someone of Jaros’ talent level could have better designed a mask with food ingredients). It was, however, the best of the three parts to the dish, and in fact one of the best dishes of the night. I found the jellyfish, crab, celtuce, and daikon Thai chili-lime sauce extremely well-balanced and very refreshing, bursting with flavour (and I had just come back from a week in Thailand so I can tell you it measured very well to various similar but original preparations I had had in the mother country). In contrast to the mask, the fins looked exactly like the fins you swim with, and the taste was particular but intriguing: I liked the crab more, but these were great too. The rest of the dishes were more or less just as successful as these first two creations, with perhaps the lobster and the amadai reaching the highest gastronomic and sybaritic peaks of the evening. Amadai is an interesting fish, not commonly found out in the West: so if you travel to the Orient, so make sure you try it if it is present on the menu of a restaurant you might be dining in. Amadai, also known as Japanese tilefish or Branchiostegus japonicus ofr the scientist’s amongst us, is a bottom-dwelling fish native to the western Pacific Ocean, and I can see why it is so prized. It’s firm snowy-white flesh (it looks like that of halibut) is remarkably juicy and flavourful. A native of the western Pacific Ocean and especially abundant along Japan’s coast line from Niigata to Kyushu, it can grow up to 1.3 kilos in size, so it’s not exactly a small fish. The desserts were fine too, but if I may suggest only one thing to Jaros it would be to diversify the desserts more. While the petit-fours are spot on (and served in a sleek, elegant side room with a beautiful glass façade allowing for a view outside), the dessert while fresh and welcome, was very similar to in texture, temperature and creaminess to a sort of a creamsicle he very kindly prepares table side for each guest at the end of the meal. Were that creamsicle or ice cream on a stick made of chocolate or strawberry, it would be fine, but as it was it was a creamy repetition of an already creamy dessert. But that’s a very small quibble to what was a very fun, excellent meal. Well done to the happy couple, they have built up something really different and memorable. Not everyone manning kitchens and restaurants can say as much.

The wines

Louis Michel 2022 Chablis Butteaux Premier Cru 92

Rare 2013 Champagne Brut 95

The wine list at TING is not excessively long but covers all the bases. Some wines are very well-priced, while others are more expensive than in other restaurants of similar level in the city, so no surprises there. The great names are all there from Billecart-Salmon to Gaja to Joly to Bassermann-Jordan to Louis Roederer to Keller to Rare/Piper Heidsieck. I brought my own Chablis from home, and it performed well with many of the dishes. The warm 2022 is not my favourite year for Chablis as it flattens some of this wine’s proverbial verve and lift, but the bigger-bodied mouthfeel of this specific vintage and the Butteaux cru and its large-scaled wines allowed it to be a perfect sparring partner for some of the evening’s creamier dishes. No such worries with the Rare Champagne, always a vibrantly fresh concoction that rarely disappoints. It was perfect with a number of the lighter, higher-acid dishes on the night.

Should you be visiting Shanghai for business soon, or just spending a vacation there, make sure you book a seat at TING, it is most certainly worth doing so.

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