Picture: Sarah D Miller
There are few animals the Chinese won’t throw live into a pan of bubbling oil and call dinner. Even in Shanghai, where Western influences have introduced the notion of fresh milk and, even more resonantly, the croissan’wich, the official dish of autumn is still da zha xie, or hairy crab. And the name is no euphemism. But somehow, despite sharing a border and a philosophy with Russia, they’ve never quite got the point of fish eggs.
It’s not for squeamishness, obviously: the Chinese will down a fowl’s egg cooked, raw, even with a smidgen of foetus. Nor is it an ethical concern, considering the amount of shark’s fin that goes down at the average wedding buffet. And the ingredients are plentiful – in fact, China’s sturgeon are known to break records for pure girth.
Not even the thriving appetites of le beau Shanghai have managed to stop caviar slipping through the cracks of this 5,000-year-old civilisation.
But that’s something two ex-ad men from the UK are trying to change – or so I discovered recently, while sticking to a black vinyl banquette at The Spot, a stalwart of Shanghai’s fabled expat village, where I’d come to meet the city’s caviar impresario, Steve Hinchliffe.
Three years ago, Hinchliffe and his longtime business partner, Toby Collins, met someone who knew someone who knew of a sturgeon farm in central China that made a fortune exporting roe to the Middle East. The pair figured, quite justifiably, that if they could create just the slightest demand for the product among China’s million millionaires, they could make all those export riches seem like a rounding error. They set up a distribution outfit with the name Black Pearl and went door to door with samples of the stuff for Chinese restaurateurs who didn’t know how lucky they were.
“One of the biggest sellers in the karaoke bars is Cognac,” Hinchliffe says of the less-savoury-than-they-sound private-suite clubs
Black Pearl’s HQ is a five-minute walk from The Spot, but you’d be right in guessing that Hinchliffe does much of his business right here in the corner booth. He strolls in, briefcase in hand, shirt sleeves rolled up, to greetings from a pair of lithe, approving waitresses, not to mention the barman, who emerges with a chilled bottle of Absolut and two tumblers.
“Now this isn’t the way we’re selling it here in China,” says Hinchliffe, pouring me three fingers. “But the Russians take it with vodka, and I thought you’d like it best.” Perhaps he sees in me a resemblance to his associate Yuliya, an Amazonian 20-something from Vladivostok who models for the product brochures and joins us later for dinner.
Or perhaps he simply sees me as a lightweight. Here in China, where Cognac is the drink of choice of the upwardly mobile, Hinchliffe performs Black Pearl tastings with shots of Remy Martin. When devising this bespoke method for his customers, he took inspiration from the marketeers behind Chivas Regal, a blended whisky that languished in China until promoters paired it with a local fail-safe: green tea. “One of the biggest sellers in the karaoke bars is Cognac,” Hinchliffe says of the less-savoury-than-they-sound private-suite clubs locals call KTV. “We wanted to create a Chinese way of consuming caviar, so we’re pairing it with something they’re used to.”
Progress has been slow yet steady – considerably slower than, say, Frappuccino and Versace. And yet the Hiltons, Hyatts and Westins in town all now offer Black Pearl at their abundant Sunday brunches
Unlocking a 10g disc of Black Pearl with a coin, Hinchliffe instructs me to make a loose “thumbs-up” with my right hand, then scoops out a mound with a mother-of-pearl spoon and slathers it on the skin between my thumb and forefinger.
“Now slurp it up.”
This is the technique Hinchliffe is pushing here in Shanghai: a slurp of caviar followed by a slurp of liquor. It’s more dramatic than Russia’s, and somewhat less demure than in Paris, where Champagne is the preferred accompaniment. But if you’ve ever been to a high-rent Shanghai club, where waiters bring bottles of bubbly in LED-lit ice buckets surrounded by dry ice and sparklers, you’ll understand why.
Progress has been slow yet steady – considerably slower than, say, Frappuccino and Versace. And yet the Hiltons, Hyatts and Westins in town all now offer Black Pearl at their abundant Sunday brunches and on their sway-the-client bar menus. Hinchliffe says he’s sold about 100kg since he started hauling around his briefcase of delights in 2009.
Today Black Pearl and Remy are being sucked back all along the high-rent art deco riverfront strip known as the Bund, particularly in decadent nightclubs like Bar Rouge and Mint. At the exquisite Renaissance-style Waldorf Astoria, which anchors the Bund in the south, guests prefer it Euro-style, on white toast with bubbly, at the legendary 34-metre Long Bar.
Even in Plaza 66, the luxury shopping centre dubbed the “ghost mall” by expats who once saw its five Louis Vuitton boutiques as untenable (they were proven wrong), a pair of well-shod businesswomen are having a spread with a bottle of rosé at Specchi, an Italian-style café decorated with Philippe Starck Ghost chairs. “They like it because it’s not too much to eat, and it’s healthy,” Specchi’s manager, Matthew Jing, tells me when we join Hinchliffe and Yuliya a week later. Jing goes through about 500g a month of the stuff, sold to the kind of customer who subscribes to the anti-ageing claims of caviar-infused face creams by La Prairie.
Jing seems game for a complimentary tin out of Hinchliffe’s black leather bag. Or maybe he just happened to skip breakfast today. Regardless, he goes into the kitchen for some toast to slather it on and returns with a bottle of Champagne for our party. He’s an altogether different species from Talos Zhaosong, a 29-year-old entrepreneur I spied with a 50g tin a day earlier at the Hilton’s Penthouse Bar. He said he’d scarf it out of the tin with a spoon before dinner most days.
Hinchliffe is all smiles when I tell him this. His hopes are with the young and wealthy, people who, Jing says, “are more open to trying new things”. Happily, despite China’s increasingly unpopular population-control policies, there is no shortage of wealthy youngsters in Shanghai. Happily – because the chances of caviar appreciation seeping into the middle classes are, Hinchliffe admits, “exactly the same as everywhere else in the world. Very unlikely.”
Ellen Himelfarb is a London-based Canadian writer for CNN Travel; Wallpaper* and The Sunday Telegraph