When Wuyuan Bingjia first opened in 1936, it was one of many Shanghai-style bakeries around town, churning out trays of benbang dim sum dishes to be eaten on the go or taken home and enjoyed with the family. Now, as the city grows skyward and Shanghainese palates skew more international, these old-style bakeries are slowly dying out. Wuyuan Bingjia is one of the last ones standing, and it’s not thanks to the service. (Word to the wise: Be ready to order when you get to the cashier or you’ll get an earful from the waitstaff.)

Fun fact: More than 70 percent of the meat eaten in China is pork. And while stuffing yourself with xiaolongbao and hongshao rou is a must when eating in Shanghai, it can be nice to have a respite at halal restaurants like Miss Ali. Yan Ali, the owner and namesake of the restaurant, arrived in Shanghai from Xinjiang – China’s predominantly Muslim province in the country’s far northwest, where she previously hosted TV shows. Ali didn’t like the way her native cuisine was often represented in Shanghai – with waiters robed in garish “costumes” and performing songs and dances from their region – and decided to create a more accurate representation of the restaurants of Xinjiang.

When the nationalist Kuomintang army retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after losing to Mao’s communist forces, the island experienced a sudden influx of immigrants from around Mainland China, many ripped from their homeland and moved into crowded, hastily-assembled housing complexes. These gave rise to tenement communities, called military villages (眷村, juàncūn). During the years after the war, these new immigrants kept the memory of their hometowns alive, recreating the dishes of their childhood but – out of necessity – using local ingredients and adapting the recipes. Out of this homesickness arose a new type of Taiwanese cooking called Military Village Cuisine.

Healthy eating and Chinese food are often hard to combine, but Karen Chen has discovered the recipe. After the success of Jianguo 328 (a homestyle Shanghainese restaurant that forgoes MSG and uses filtered water to boil its excellent noodles), the Taiwanese restaurateur decided to look west – where spice is king – for her next venture: Yi Zhang Hong. The friendly Sichuan restaurant is cobbled together with a narrow staircase leading up to cheerful dining rooms over three floors. On each level, bright folk art hangs on white walls above long banquettes and blond wood tables, and the red-tiled bar on the first floor is decorated with bottles of imported wine and beer and canisters of local tea.

It was Mr. Liu’s huge grin that first caught our eye, welcoming us into his humble, living room-sized restaurant. Scanning the small space, we suspected we had hit upon a gem: white tile walls, basic stools, vegetables crammed into the fridges in the dining room and fiery red dishes dotting the tables of happy diners – all hallmarks of the down-to-earth eateries we’re always looking for. As we sat down and he started explaining his specialties, we could feel his genuine interest in having us taste his authentic Sichuanese cuisine, going well beyond just making another sale.

In Shanghai, wet markets hold the telltale signs that spring is finally upon us. Stalks of asparagus as thick as a thumb spring up first, alongside brown and white bamboo shoots so freshly pulled from the earth that dirt still clings to their fibrous shells. But the most exciting spring green is fava beans (蚕豆, cándòu), also known as broad beans. Their short season in Shanghai – usually just about four to five weeks – means they’re in high demand, and stalls are filled with workers shelling the labor-intensive beans by the bushel.

A Jun grills up more than just seafood at their Shouning Lu shop. These enoki mushrooms are powdered with four types of pepper before being thrown on the fire.

Er Guang Wontons serves up steaming wontons well into the evening every night. The pork-stuffed dumplings come slathered in peanut chili sauce, as all late-night snacks should be.

So you’ve eaten your way around Shanghai’s delicious noodle shops and restaurants but want to bring a taste of China back home? Or maybe you’re searching for a weird food gift (pickled chicken feet anyone?) for a hard-to-please friend. You’re in luck, as specialty food shops dot the city and are quite popular with locals, offering a huge variety of well-packaged items.

Whether you call it steamboat, hotpot, Chinese fondue or shabu shabu, one thing is certain: Nothing warms you up in the depths of winter like a steaming bowl of bone broth. As winter continues its dreary hold, here are five of the best places to get hotpot in Shanghai.

Bāozi (包子), or steamed buns, are a basic, on-the-go meal. It’s rare to come across a shop selling these buns for more than 1.5 RMB (US$0.25), and yet, the past five years have seen a dramatic rise in the stature of this humble dish – thanks mostly to celebrity chef David Chang, whose Momofuku pork bun has become world-famous. They even got a domestic boost in 2013, when President Xi Jinping visited a local 60-year-old baozi shop in Beijing. (Now, thanks to an hours-long queue to try the “President Special,” that chain is looking to go public.) Legend has it that baozi date back to the Three Kingdoms period (A.D. 220-280) and are credited to Zhuge Liang, a renowned military strategist who was also an eccentric foodie. He invented both this steamed bun and our favorite breakfast treat: the jianbing

Search online for Shanghai’s best fried dumplings, and you’ll come up with hundreds of results extolling Yang’s Fried Dumplings. Though it was once just a humble shop sandwiched between the Bund and People’s Square, the online renown and ensuing crowds have propelled the brand into chain-store ubiquity, populating new malls and shopping streets with fervor. In essence, they’ve become the Starbucks of dumplings; you’re going to get a relatively consistent product, but come on, you can do so much better! Enter Yang Yang’s.

Shanghai’s farm country is closer than most residents imagine, especially when surrounded by the city’s seemingly endless forest of skyscrapers. But just beyond the spires is a huge, green oasis: Chongming. Somewhat smaller than Hawaii’s Kauai, this island at the mouth of the Yangtze River grows much of the municipality’s food supply. The government is pushing plans forward to develop the area with “eco-friendly” industries by 2020 but, as usual, has not provided many details on how these goals will be achieved. A stopping point for millions of migratory birds each year, the island (for now) has several wetland zones and ecological parks that are open to visitors, making it a worthwhile jaunt for those wanting to escape Shanghai’s urban jungle.

Back in 2012 when Culinary Backstreets still had that new car smell, we wrote our first article on xiaolongbao. The investigative report detailed the bun’s regional variations – Shanghai versus Nanjing – and called out our two favorite places to eat each city’s specialty soup dumplings. Understanding, appreciating and loving these local specialties is a part of life for residents of pork-obsessed Shanghai. Arguing the merits of different restaurants’ xiaolongbao is a citywide pastime for both locals and expats alike, but one man has taken the fascination further than the rest of us combined.

One of the seven necessities of Chinese daily life, rice is eaten in many forms throughout the day, including – and especially – at breakfast. Congee is undoubtedly China’s best-known breakfast food, but less famous globally, and wildly popular locally, is the unassuming rice ball (饭团, fàn tuán).