In a private dining room at the Deda, head chef Lu Xiaozhou is chatting enthusiastically about sous-vide cooking and molecular gastronomy. An earnest, bespectacled man of 32, he’s been working in this Shanghai restaurant since he was 18 years old. But while he’s au fait with contemporary culinary trends, Lu is a specialist in a unique local genre: Shanghainese “western food”. The restaurant’s full name is Deda Western Food Society, a reference to the German entrepreneur who founded it in 1897, combined with a 19th-century Shanghainese term for western cooking, “great cuisine”. We meet over cups of milky tea in the private dining room on the top floor, which is decked out in vintage European style with an elaborate mantelpiece and a wind-up gramophone.
在德大的一个私人包间里，厨师长鲁效周(Lu Xiaozhou)正热情地谈论着低温慢煮和分子美食。这位32岁的戴眼镜男士，自18岁起便在这家上海餐厅工作。尽管他对现代烹饪趋势了如指掌，鲁效周却专注于一种独特的本地风格：上海“西菜”。餐厅的全名是德大西菜社(Deda Western Food Society)，名字来源于1897年由德国企业家创办的餐厅，并结合了19世纪上海对西菜的称呼“大菜”。我们在顶楼的私人包间里见面，那里装饰着复古的欧洲风格，有一个精致的壁炉和一台发条留声机。