Second Helpings: Wujie

What: A restaurant chain that focuses on using seasonal ingredients to create a menu solely focused around a plant-based diet
Where: 392 Tianping Lu, near Hengshan Lu. Tel: 3469 2857. Web: www.wujieglobal.com
Why: For creative, Chinese and international vegetarian dishes
As one of our New Year’s resolutions, we decided to commit to reducing our red meat intake and cut down on our carbon footprint. As such, we decided it was time to revisit one of our favourite vegetarian restaurants in the city, which places a high emphasis on promoting a plantbased lifestyle, whilst working with local farmers and producers to source the best, most environmentally friendly produce from around the country.
We visited the beautifully designed restaurant in Xuhui, opposite the park, where the natural muted colour palette, with wooden accents, reflects the adjacent scenery, and offers a tranquil start to dinner.
 
We selected a variety of cold dishes from the interactive iPad menu, including our favourite dish of the evening, golden oyster mushroom and king oyster mushroom with peanut chilli sauce (RMB 56), which packed the punch of any good Sichuan dish. We also enjoyed the creatively served lentillifera seaweed with a vinaigrette
dressing (RMB 78), where the strands of seaweed were hung over a fork, dangling into the vinaigrette below. The braised organic lotus seed and ginger paste (RMB 78), was also a sweet and interesting palate cleanser.
For the main dishes, we enjoyed deepfried lotus root with soya bean sauce (RMB 58), and stir-fried apricot abalone mushroom with spicy vegetarian seafood sauce (RMB 58), which both proved hearty replacements to the typical meat dishes normally ordered at this point.
 
For dessert, we couldn’t resist the restaurant’s molten chocolate cake (RMB 52), which we felt we deserved after such a healthy meal. We also selected a few winter flavours from the company’s Miss Ma vegetable coloured macaron brand (RMB 15 each). The interesting combinations, such as beetroot and sea salt, spinach and wheatgrass or our favourite, purple cabbage and dark chocolate, ended the alternative meal on a high.
 
If the Xuhui location is not convenient for you, the company now has two other venues in Shanghai, on the Bund and in Lujiazui, as well as restaurants in Nanjing, Hangzhou and a brand new venue in Suzhou, making it that much easier to be environmentally aware.