Hongshao rou: red-braised pork, the dish Shanghai argues about

Hongshao rou means "red-cooked pork", and red here refers to the colour it turns from caramelised sugar and dark soy — it is not spicy. Proper versions are sweet-savoury, jellied at the edges, and require nothing more than rice to be a meal.

It is the defining Shanghai dish, which means it is also the dish most often got wrong for visitors: too sweet, too dark, or reduced to a handful of neat cubes in a restaurant that is aiming at tourists.

What good looks like

Colour: deep reddish-brown, glossy, not black. Texture: the fat should be translucent and wobble when the plate moves. The lean should give way to chopsticks entirely.

If it arrives as neat cubes of lean with visible fat layers, it has not been braised long enough. Real hongshao rou is braised for one to two hours.

Benbang cuisine in one paragraph

"Benbang" means local cuisine, and Shanghai food is defined by dark soy, sugar, rice wine and slow braising. It is sweeter than Cantonese, less oily than Sichuan, and much less spicy than most visitors expect.

That sweetness is deliberate and it is the thing visitors either love immediately or never accept. Nobody makes it without sugar. If you dislike sweet-savoury pork, try the white-cut chicken instead.

Ordering it well

It is a shared dish, so it works best with two other things and rice. Order it with a green vegetable and something light — a plate of it alone becomes monotonous by the fourth cube.

Neighbourhood restaurants do it better than hotel restaurants. Look for places with laminated menus, plastic stools and a lunch crowd.