YK (Japanese BBQ Restaurant in Shanghai)

Hi everyone, I recently went out to eat at a Japanese BBQ restaurant here in Shanghai, and I'd like to share the photos. Also, this will sort of serve as an answer to the question "what's it like going to a mall in Shanghai, post-lockdown?"

First, we took a taxi to get to the restaurant. In the taxi there is a location code that you have to scan with your phone, related to COVID-19 contact tracing- I've written about these location codes in my many blog posts about the pandemic situation in Shanghai.

Location code inside the taxi. (Red lines added by me.)

At this point (several months after the lockdown ended) the taxi drivers sometimes remind you to scan the location code, and sometimes don't.

Here we are arriving at the mall. Outside the main entrance, there is a location code that you have to scan:

The sign says you have to wear a mask, scan the location code, show a negative nucleic acid test result from within the past 72 hours, and have a temperature less than 37.3 C.

Security guard at the door is making sure everyone has the green health code/ scanned the location code correctly/ has the negative result from the past 72 hours. (Okay but honestly, most security guards don't really bother to check all those things.)

There also exist scanners, like the one here (zoomed in version of the image above it), which will scan your health code. But I very very rarely see these used- I think my health code has been scanned by one of these maybe 3 times in the past 3 months?

Every store in the mall has a location code. You are supposed to scan it if you enter the store. Some stores enforce it and some don't.

Now, the employees in this mall were wearing more intense PPE than what I normally see here in post-lockdown Shanghai. Usually employees of restaurants/stores are just wearing a mask, and customers are wearing a mask (except at restaurants- then customers are not wearing masks). But at this mall, most of the employees had face shields and/or thin disposable gowns, in addition to masks. (Customers still wore masks everywhere except in restaurants.) 

Apparently one of the malls in the area recently had a covid case and the whole mall had to close for a few days. So now that they're open again, they have some more intense rules than elsewhere in Shanghai.

Employee wearing a mask and face shield.

Two employees wearing masks and face shields.

Here we are at the restaurant, YK. We have to scan the location code before entering.

In this restaurant, each table has a little grill built into the center, and you grill the food yourself right there.

To order your food, you scan this QR code. They don't give you a physical menu.

Cold mashed potatoes with some vegetables mixed in, and an egg on top.

Each person gets their own little sauce tray.

We ordered a bunch of plates of raw meat:

Cooking the meat.

The orange thing is a pumpkin slice. The white thing is niangao (年糕) which is made of rice.

This is some kind of ... like burger patty with goose liver on top, or something?

Fried rice, wrapped up in scrambled eggs, with various meat/ fish balls.

This is the control panel for the grill in the center of the table.

Employees wearing PPE.

Free mints! Also a lucky cat.

Here are phone chargers you can rent.

At the kiosk at the entrance to the restaurant, they have hand sanitizer and a thermometer. They weren't actually using the thermometer, but I guess they had it there for pandemic reasons.

Here's the entrance to the restaurant.

After dinner, we walked around the mall some more.

Security guard at the Apple store, making sure everyone scanned the location code. The Apple store was more strict about it than the other stores in the mall.

Inside the Apple store, you can see the employees with masks and face shields, and the customers with masks.

Then we went out the back door of the mall, which turned out to be a weird area with a bunch of shelves, where delivery people were constantly coming and going, dropping off food deliveries for the mall employees. (Ie if you work at this mall, and you order yourself a dinner, it will get delivered here and left on the shelf for you.)

The delivery people in yellow work for Meituan, the ones in blue work for Eleme. Both of these are big platforms where you can order food to be delivered from basically any restaurant.

Then we went to a different mall across the street and walked around.

Entrance to the mall. A security guard makes sure you scan the location code.

A bored security guard stands outside the mall.

So there you have it! Overall, I thought the BBQ restaurant was very good. Very cool to grill the meat yourself, right there at your table. Also, I am sharing the pictures of location codes and things like that to kind of give you a sense of how China's anti-covid policies look in our everyday lives.

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For more photos from my life in China, check out the "travel" tag~