Head over the La Fu You, a new Sichuan restaurant in Shanghai’s Jing’an district that’s bringing some serious heat in a bistro setting. Highly recommended!
About La Fu You Sichuan Kitchen
La Fu You’s interiors resembles many Shanghai bistros — clean design with tasteful tilework and colorful, eye-catching posters and art. The setting is comfortable and convivial for a casual meal. It’s located on Yanping Lu near Changping Lu, right across from Sloppy Gin.
It’s a venture by Juan, a first-time restaurant operator from the culture and entertainment industry who’s running the restaurant this as a side project along with her business partner from the F&B industry.
To ensure the menu’s authenticity, they’ve employed chefs directly from Chengdu to execute the food, which is excellent.
The Food at La Fu You
On the menu are fiery fan-favorite Sichuan dishes including Kou Shui Ji aka “saliva chicken” and Fuqi Feipian, sliced beef and ox tongue in chili sauce (¥42, 夫妻肺片), as well as delicacies of rabbit head with bullfrog (¥118, 鸡兔同龙) and custardy pig brain served simmered in a spicy broth (¥38, 纯情恋哸脑).
The ever-popular Yuxiang Rousi is just perfect. This is one of the most iconic Sichuan dishes, and despite its name—yuxiang, which means fish fragrance—it doesn’t contain any fish. It’s a stir-fry of lean pork, celtuce, and wood ear mushrooms, tossed in a sauce that’s tangy, sweet, spicy, and sour. It’s saucy and garlicky and demands a bowl of rice.
However, the winning dish for me was the Crispy Fried Intestines. Connoisseurs of offal like myself may find this dish hard to top. Intestines are fried to a crispy finish with chilies, numbing peppercorns, and dried spices. The rings are crispy, some edges crunchy, and some larger pieces have a tender and slightly gooey center.
It is also not at all oily. Fair warning, it packs quite some heat, marked on the menu with four chilies, the highest spice rating of all the dishes.
Then you have the standards, which are cheap and tasty and easy to love, like fried long beans and a cold dish of sliced pork belly soaked in chili oil with tons of garlic.
Don’t miss the Yacai Fried Rice, an unassuming dish imbued with wokhei and so much flavor. It’s fried with yacai, a version of preserved mustard greens, egg, and bits of pork lard.
I do implore you to get the Jiuniang Douhua dessert mid-meal. It’s rather effective, if not necessary, in staunching the spicy burn. It’s a dessert of sweet-fermented rice (jiuniang) with fluffy, extra-soft uncurdled tofu, goji, and fun, crunchy pearls of water chestnut encased in tapioca.
In Summary
The menu is small compared to other Chinese restaurants of similar nature, but all heavy hitters. Everything I had was fantastic.
They also do a few lunch sets, a couple dishes like the Yuxiang Rousi served with complimentary rice (otherwise ¥5 a serving), as well as sets starting from ¥188 for four dishes.
For drinks, they have a modest selection of white and red wines, beer, and soft drinks. My go-to would be the sour plum (¥16, 酸梅汤) and soybean drink (¥18, 冰豆浆), both complementary to the spicy stuff.
La Fu You opened at the end of April.
La Fu You 辣富友
Address: No. 1, 446 Yanping Lu 延平路446弄1号
Tel: 15300497115
Hours: Tue-Sun, 11:30am-1:30pm, 5:30pm-10:30pm; closed Monday
