Michelin Shanghai 2019: T’ang Court Loses Its Third Star, Xin Rong Ji Gains a Second

The Michelin Guide announced its third selection for Shanghai on 20 September 2018. The 2019 edition listed 34 starred restaurants, four more than the year before, and it made two changes at the top that altered the picture given by the first edition two years earlier.

One three-star restaurant

T’ang Court, the Cantonese restaurant at The Langham that had held three stars since the guide’s arrival, was moved to two. The original award had been the most disputed decision of the first guide. Its removal left Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet, promoted a year earlier, as the only three-star restaurant in the city.

Xin Rong Ji

The one promotion to two stars went to Xin Rong Ji on Nanyang Road. The restaurant group was founded in the 1990s in Taizhou, on the coast of Zhejiang, and built its name on the seafood of the East China Sea, cooked simply: yellow croaker braised with rice cakes, sand-garlic noodles, small crabs and razor clams brought in each morning. It had expanded to Shanghai and then Beijing with unusual discipline for a Chinese restaurant group, and this was the first time that the cooking of a smaller coastal city, neither Cantonese nor classical Shanghainese, had reached the guide’s upper tier. The group went on to lead the first Beijing guide a year later.

With T’ang Court, there were eight two-star restaurants: L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana, Imperial Treasure, Yi Long Court at The Peninsula, Yong Foo Elite, Canton 8 and Xin Rong Ji.

Five new one-star restaurants

Two of the five were in hotels that had opened within the previous year. Il Ristorante Niko Romito, at the Bulgari Hotel Shanghai, received a star three months after the hotel’s opening. Le Comptoir de Pierre Gagnaire, at Capella Shanghai, Jian Ye Li, was the French chef’s first restaurant in mainland China.

The other three were Chinese, and each from a different tradition: Moose, for a creative reading of Huaiyang cooking; Ji Pin Court, for contemporary Cantonese; and Amazing Chinese Cuisine, for modern Teochew food. Twenty-six restaurants received the Bib Gourmand.

What it showed

In its third year the guide was correcting its first impressions. The dominance of Cantonese restaurants, which had drawn criticism in 2016, was diluted by Huaiyang, Teochew and Taizhou cooking, and the international hotel restaurants were joined by Chinese groups with regional roots. The process continued: by 2026 the guide had been enlarged to cover Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang together, with Taizhou itself, the home of Xin Rong Ji, among its cities.