Ordering food in Shanghai when you speak no Chinese

This is easier than most people fear. Shanghai restaurant staff deal with foreign visitors constantly, most menus in the centre have photographs or English, and the two apps you need handle both reading and paying.

The one genuinely useful thing to learn is the pointing method, because it works everywhere including places with no English at all.

The three apps to install before you arrive

Dianping (大众点评) is the Chinese Yelp and restaurant-booking layer combined. It is the single most useful app for finding food, with photographs of dishes ordered by real customers. It has enough English support to navigate.

Meituan handles the same plus delivery. Alipay and WeChat Pay handle payment — and both now accept foreign Visa and Mastercard after the 2023 reforms, though you should set them up before you land rather than standing at a till.

Google Translate’s camera mode handles printed Chinese menus acceptably. It is unreliable for handwritten ones, which is why pointing still wins.

The pointing method

Walk into the room, look at what other tables are eating, point at the dish you want, and hold up fingers for quantity. This works in essentially every small restaurant in the city.

If there is a laminated picture menu, point at the picture and the number. If there is a QR code on the table, scan it — most restaurants now order entirely through WeChat mini-programs that may have a photo interface.

Learn four characters: 不要 — "don’t want", used constantly. 微辣 = slightly spicy. 不辣 = not spicy. 素 = vegetarian.

How many dishes to order

The standard is one dish per person plus one for the table, plus rice. Two people: three dishes. Four people: five or six.

Chinese meals arrive whenever they are ready rather than in courses, and nobody minds if things come out in the wrong order. Rice arrives last, which surprises people used to it arriving first.

Paying

Almost nothing in Shanghai requires cash. Scan-to-pay via Alipay or WeChat is near-universal, card is accepted in larger places, and cash is accepted everywhere by law but is increasingly awkward.

Set up your card in Alipay before you fly — the verification steps can require SMS to a number you may not have working yet.

Tipping

Not expected, not required, and genuinely unusual outside places catering specifically to expats. There is no tipping line on receipts.

If service was exceptional, leaving small change is fine but not meaningful. Do not tip in taxi equivalents or worry about it.