The speed with which restaurants open and close in Shanghai is unbelievably high that even residents like ourselves have a hard time keeping up.  Each week, I have to bike around our neighborhood streets to check out if there are any new store signs put up or constructions started. No wonder every time I went back to my hometown San Jose, California, I was often shocked to see venerable restaurants from my younger days still standing.

This is not to say that new shops are always better than old, but it does speak to the unprecedented number of entrepreneurs who are seizing the opportunity to make it out here in Shanghai. These aren’t the big corporate restaurant chains you see in more matured markets; these are the small guys who started with one concept/location. As the capital to start something in China is still relatively lower than in western countries, many foreigners also jump into the fray. As a result, we witnessed many experiments — some succeeded with flying colors and some crashed and burned. The consumers are (more?) fickle in Shanghai so the businesses have to work extra hard to stay relevant.

Four new additions to our neighborhood show promise and I’d like to introduce to our guests:

1. La Strada - sister cafe of Amokka on Anfu Rd and serves excellent Italian-style thin crust pizzas.  You can also order their pizzas from Amokka, which has a nice upstairs dining lounge.

2. Pho Real - deserves a mention even though it replaced our favorite hole-in-the-wall Xinjiang restaurant.  They serve a set menu which includes light appetizers like spring rolls followed by a bowl of Vietnamese beef noodle soup.

3. Bistro Burger - promises gourmet burgers and fancy milkshakes.  Putting a plug in for our Closed Cafe partner Eduardo and tried out the food at the soft opening.  Reasonable priced and tasty burgers are always welcomed by all

4. Lapis Thai on Hunan Rd - housed in an ambient villa on Hunan Rd and serving consistent quality food with nice presentation.  I personally think the setting is more beautiful than Coconut Paradise.  Lapis also has another location in Taiking Rd’s Tianzifang.

Judging from the mix, we can use more tasty and stylish Chinese restaurants too~

See more neighborhood restaurants on our Neighborhood Map here.

TripAdvisor traveler rating: 5 of 5 stars

I recently stayed for four nights in one of Quintet’s five rooms. My whole stay in Shanghai was fantastic and Quintet was a big reason why. The information pack provided at check-in was detailed and…

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Yesterday, a friend who’s visiting Shanghai showed up at the B&B and told me that her cell phone has just been stolen at the Shanghai Train Station. This is one of the several theft incidences that have happened to people I know in the last month in Shanghai — including myself.

I got my wallet stolen on our very own ChangLe Rd two weekends ago while talking on the phone. Only the week before that, a guy tried to open my backpack but I found out before he was able to take anything. Sadly, this ill attempt didn’t make me more cautious so I ended up paying the price. The shocking thing is that I’ve been living in the neighborhood for almost 4 years and I can say it’s been one of the safest neighborhoods in Shanghai.

Another guest of the B&B told me that she had “lost” her camera at the subway station on the last day of their stay. I gently told her that she probably didn’t lose the camera - it was probably stolen. Photos of her entire trip were on the camera so needless to say, it was a big loss for her.

We’re not sure if the theft figures have gone up for Shanghai in recent weeks, but would like to warn everyone coming here to really be careful with their bags etc when they’re out and about. It’s wise to not put valuables in front pockets of your backpack or leave bags unbuttons or unzipped. keep bags in front of your body at all times. If you feel that someone is walking too close to you, beware. A lot of times they also travel in a group, and can be mom/babe, teenager, etc.

Petty theft is a problem that plagues most big cities around the world, and I guess Shanghai is not an exception. My bet is that things will get under control for the Expo next year ;-p

Our B&B is turning 1 on September 6!  In the last week or so, I have been reflecting on how the first year went and thought I should write about it to remember–

Good friends from all over the world

Last year at this time, we had just put up our website and listed Quintet on several websites, but weren’t sure who was going to find out about our place.  Luckily, we soon got our first guest Patrick, a Shanghai expat who booked our entire house to celebrate his 40th birthday.  As guests began to roll in, we got busy tuning the rooms, service, etc. and there hasn’t been a boring day since!

We have received 300 groups of guests over the year.  Pouring over our booking records, I can still remember a lot of the faces and conversations.  We have about a third of the guests coming from Europe, a third from the US and Canada, and the remaining third from Australia and New Zealand.  We also have occasional guests from Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Japan.  Our guests for the most part are very cool and laid back.  They understand the B&B environment and really appreciate the casualness and coziness that they don’t get at big, fancy hotels.  Many are working in the design or fashion industries (yes, we get quite a few attractive gay men coming through, sigh).  There also many couples on their romantic getaway (or rendezvous) for whom we arranged for in-room massages, bubble baths… But what we enjoyed the most were the chats with guests.  Always curious about what they experienced in Shanghai/China, what do they do back home — we treasure the “yuan” of meeting everyone in our little house.

Learn to deal with challenges

The year was also spent in fixing things.  Given the house is 70 years old and has its limitations, we knew from the beginning that it needed a lot of maintanence.  We also put in a lot of equipment for the first time and weren’t sure how well they’d work.  So in the last year, we have had pretty much everything breaking at least once.. AC, Satellite TV, phone PBX, water leaks, plugged toilets, cracked walls… I’m the inquisitive type who likes to get to the root causes, and I really learned a lot (I feel like I’m ready to build a house from scratch)  Ultimately, I also learned to accept imperfections– this is not an excuse or cop out and I hope our guests will understand!

Future plans

In the coming year, we’re looking to beef up on staffing so we can provide longer office hours and more services (tours and activities referrals and organization).  We are also looking into a second location so you might see a Quintet II sometime down the road~

TripAdvisor traveler rating: 5 of 5 stars

We received a high recommendation from a friend to stay at the Quintet in Shanghai and from the moment we inquired, the owner, Fay was beyond helpful responding to our emails and questions. She also…

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Our first year anniversary is almost here and this week we’re busy doing maintenance throughout the house. We’ve had a few leaks from our old roof so had to replace with a new steel cover on the Aurora room. The steel pieces had to be hauled up from outside the house to the rooftop.

All the walls are painted again. My dear designer assured me that we can buy some base paint and colorant and an experienced painter can hand mix the colors for our walls. It turned out that the colors for each room are quite subtle and impossible to mix by hand, so we ended up cutting out a piece of the wall from each room to take to the paint shop for the machine to do the job. Also, our colors have strayed from the original colors we picked from the color samples (color paints rarely come out exactly as you wanted) so manual adjustments were still necessary. Thank god that the color mixer at the shop had a good eye for colors. Because our walls are old, so tiny cracks are inevitable even with a fresh coat of paint. I guess this is why our house has an authentic Old Shanghai feel

We also picked a new tone on-tone-pattern for our duvet covers. This time we went for a bolder pattern and didn’t use the color strip for framing. New towels and bathrobes are also made. What should we do with the old batch of linens? I’d like to donate to the victims of the recent Morakot Typhoon in Taiwan (my hometown) but the shipping may be difficult to arrange (too much to hand carry and too little for container shipment). Anyone can help?

It’s been a week packed with sweat and labor (ok, not mine but my contractors’). It reminded me a bit of our original construction — keeping up a house is hard work!

After weeks of research and excitement, we got confirmation that day before the eclipse that Shanghai has close to 0% chance of seeing the eclipse.  A couple of my friends’ friends who are serious eclipse chasers immediately booked plane tickets to Chengdu.  Getting away like that was out of the question for me and I was beginning to feel depressed about missing the event of a century.

Suddenly, Dorothee, a former guest now a close friend, called about our other friend Hao being willing to take on the hard job of organizing a last-minute overnight trip to Hangzhou.  Magically, he bought us all train tickets and booked hotel rooms.  So by 8pm, we were happily on our way to Hangzhou.  We got into the hotel after 10pm, went for a late night snack (most places were closed by then) and set the time to meet the next day.

After breakfast on the next day, we set out to find a place to view the eclipse.  At first, we asked the taxi driver where would be a good spot, and he took us to this park area by a river.  However, there was an ugly construction crane sitting right next door and Dorothee insisted that we should not be watching it there and that we should go back to the West Lake.  Good call, Dorothee!

Back at the lake, there were already a lot of people standing around waiting for the sun to be eaten up.  At first, the sky was cloudy so we weren’t able to see much.  We also used these NASA eclipse viewing visors, which were way too dark for the cloudy weather to see anything.  My other former guest Hiroko had bought this spiffy viewing card from Japan that worked perfectly, so everybody was borrowing hers to get a glimpse.

Around 9:34am, the sky began to turn dark, and everyone started shouting in excitement.  At that moment, the clouds also broke so we were able to see the sun totally covered!  The darkness was an eerie purplish green color that’s definitely different from a normal sunset.  The Lei Feng Ta pagoda across the late lit up with the night lights and it was sight that I’ll never forget! The totality lasted about 5 minutes and it took about 30 more minutes for the sun to go back to normal.

We were all realy realy glad that we came out to Hangzhou.  I texted my friends in Shanghai and they sadly reported rain the whole time.  Two hours after the eclipse, Hangzhou had its own downpour — we were truly lucky!

For more background on the solar eclipse, read here

This event of the century was first brought to our attention by enthusiastic guests booking months in advance.  Total and partial eclipses are actually common occurrences but what makes this July 22 one significant is that 1) it will be the longest one (5-6 minutes depending on where you watch it) in the next one hundred years and 2) it’s best seen from within the narrow band along the densly populated Yangtze River/Delta region, including Shanghai.

Here’s a map showing the eclipse’s path:  http://www.heywhatsthat.com/200907-solar-eclipse.html Here’s a map highlight the eclipse path within China:  http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/TSE2009/TSE2009iau/TSE2009-fig03.GIF The eclipse is the longest when you view it nearest the center line of the band.  Shanghai is a tad north of the center line.

In Shanghai, the eclipse will begin around 8:30am with the total eclipse starting around 9:3x-9:4x am, depending on where you are.  The only uncertainty is the weather on the morning of the 22nd.  The serious sun chasers are planning to go wherever it takes to get a good view.

Quintet is looking into organizing some kind of viewing event, possibly on our very own rooftop if the weather in Shanghai is good enough or leaving early in the morning to go somewhere in a van.

Email us if you’re interested in joining us!

TripAdvisor traveler rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve always loved the idea of anything charmingly vintage and the Quintet B&B Shanghai is exactly that of an independent Boutique Hotel with the right touch of modern amenities.

The cosy and…

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TripAdvisor traveler rating: 5 of 5 stars

My stay at the Quintet was great. The rooms were sophisticated with great bedding and all the accoutrements you’d would like. It was a pleasure to have a made to order breakfast in the cafe where you…

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