About this guide
Shanghai Street Food is an independent guide to eating in Shanghai — the breakfast counters, noodle shops, and dumpling windows that the city actually eats at, written for visitors who want to eat there too. Every guide is built around the same three questions: what is this dish, what should it cost, and how do you order it without shared language.
How we work
The dish guides on this site are written from first-hand visits. When a page shows a “last visited” date, that is the day someone on our team stood at the counter, ate the food, and confirmed the prices and hours in person. Shanghai's snack scene changes fast — shops close, menus shift with the seasons — so we re-verify pages rather than letting them drift.
Our shop and chain pages are compiled differently, and we're upfront about that: branch counts, typical spending, addresses, and opening hours on those pages come from map-platform data (Amap POI records, cross-checked against Google listings), last pulled in October 2026. Map data is remarkably good in Shanghai, but individual branches still close without notice. If you find one, tell us.
What we don't do
We don't take free meals, we don't sell placements, and no shop has paid to appear on this site or to be described favorably. When we say a bowl of noodles is worth crossing the city for — or not worth crossing the street for — that opinion is ours and nobody paid for it.
Who writes it
A small team of writers and eaters based in Shanghai. We publish under the site's name because the guides are a shared, ongoing project — one person's notes get checked, updated, and argued over by the others before they go up. The byline you can hold us to is the “last visited” date on each dish page.
How this site is funded
Hosting and the domain are paid out of pocket today. We plan to run a small amount of advertising to cover costs; if and when ads appear, they will be clearly separated from the guides, and no advertiser will have any influence over what we write. Theprivacy policy explains what data advertising and analytics involve.
Corrections and tips
Prices wrong? A shop closed? A dumpling we've scandalously overlooked? We read everything and reply to valid email — use thesupport form.