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About Bao Li Xuan

Bao Li Xuan, the Chinese restaurant at the Bulgari Hotel, is located inside a neighboring century-old historic building. The dishes showcase not only solid technique and precision, but also the chef’s creativity.

After dining at the Michelin 1-star Italian restaurant at the Bulgari Hotel Shanghai on my previous visit, I went to the hotel’s Chinese restaurant, the Michelin 2-star Bao Li Xuan, with plenty of curiosity and anticipation. It did not disappoint. Inside the century-old Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce building, the first floor houses the wine cellar and private dining rooms, the second floor is the banquet hall, and the third floor is where Bao Li Xuan is located.

  • Dusk
  • Night
  • Inside Bao Li Xuan
  • Bao Li Xuan plaque

Dining Experience

Bao Li Xuan offers seasonal menus at different times of the year, but since my girlfriend is allergic to seafood and I also cannot eat seafood because of high uric acid, we could not choose the set menu and had to order à la carte. Before coming, I did a bit of homework, so the soy sauce chicken, frog legs, and XO sauce shrimp were must-orders.

Let’s get into the photos.

From the moment you enter, a server in a beautifully old-fashioned uniform escorts you to the elevator and personally leads you to your seat. The meal begins with a cup of tea. The server lets you choose your favorite from more than a dozen tea cups in different designs, then pours a special tea for you. The serving was so small that I finished it before I could really appreciate any distinctive flavor.

  • The tea cup I chose
  • The tableware was quite refined and elegant

Next, the server brought over the condiments: XO sauce, yellow chili sauce, and soy sauce. The XO sauce had a strong shrimp and dried scallop flavor, with a slight seafood funk, but also a rich savory quality. The yellow chili sauce was excellent, somewhat similar to chopped chili, with the heat amplifying the savory notes while the yellow pepper kept it mellow. The soy sauce was ordinary, with a hint of sweetness.

My appetizer was abalone with radish. Because my girlfriend is allergic to seafood, the restaurant specially prepared radish for her. (Honestly, I could have eaten both abalones myself.) The abalone had a nice chew and was paired with sea grapes, bringing out the seafood freshness. The radish underneath had been soaked in Sprite, making it juicy and refreshing.

Seeing that I had not ordered any appetizer snacks, the server thoughtfully brought us cherry tomatoes with passion fruit. I normally do not like cherry tomatoes, but one bite completely changed my mind. After marinating, the tomatoes had none of their raw green taste left; all that remained was the bright freshness of passion fruit. Paired with the passion fruit purée, they were not sour at all and were very refreshing, instantly stimulating the appetite.

Next came the star of the meal: soy sauce chicken. Without exaggeration, this was the best soy sauce chicken I have ever had. The hotel selects Qingyuan chicken and uses a special preparation method; from the ingredients to the technique, everything is top-notch, which is what creates such an outstanding texture and flavor. The first impression is tenderness, followed by savoriness, and then sweetness. Whether it was the richer thigh meat or the chicken breast, everything was juicy with not even a hint of dryness. Unlike typical roast chicken, the skin here was very soft, yet not greasy at all. The sauce on the skin also added a delicate sweetness to the meat. It was exceptional whether paired with the traditional ginger sauce or the yellow chili sauce. My only tip is that you really need to eat it while it’s hot, because the texture drops off noticeably once it cools.

Next was the salt-and-pepper frog legs. They had a bit of a typhoon shelter style feel. Since they had just come out of the fryer, you could really tell how crisp the batter on the outside was. Unlike many fried dishes that feel heavy, this one actually felt quite light. The hotel uses the frog leg portion and had already trimmed the internal sinew to improve the dining experience. That said, the same choice is also its tradeoff: because only the legs are used and they are fried, you do not get the same big, meaty bite you would from eating a whole frog.

Then came the well-known XO sauce shrimp. This dish used a relatively uncommon ingredient called ruyi mushroom. The whole dish was very well balanced. The originally heavy, seafood-forward richness of the XO sauce was softened by the ruyi mushroom and green peas, making the dish feel much lighter while still preserving its umami. The ruyi mushroom looks a bit like king oyster mushroom, but the texture is completely different, with a crispness similar to wood ear mushrooms. The green peas underneath were only lightly blanched, which preserved both their natural sweetness and their fresh legume aroma. The shrimp were large and springy, and you could clearly feel the texture of the shrimp fibers in each bite, making them deeply satisfying. Taking a bite of shrimp and then a few peas in between kept the dish from feeling greasy at all.

By this point, we were already almost full, and only the vegetables, staple dish, and desserts had yet to arrive.

For vegetables, I chose the classic blanched Guangdong choy sum. The hotel used only the most tender parts of the greens, so there was none of that stringy, fibrous texture, though I would not say the dish was especially memorable.

Again because we could not eat seafood, we had to order the dry-fried rice noodles with Angus beef as our staple dish, and it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. According to the server, Bao Li Xuan has a dedicated supplier for its rice noodles, and supply was even interrupted during the pandemic, all in order to preserve as much authentic Cantonese flavor as possible. Unlike the beef chow fun I usually eat, which often comes with large slices of meat, the beef here was cut into thin slices, allowing the flavor of the Angus beef to come through more clearly. Aside from the rice noodles themselves, the dish did not feel oily at all and left me wanting more.

Dessert was divided into bite-sized pastries, mango pomelo sago, and red bean and mung bean sweet soups.

I did not find the small pastries especially impressive, but they were fine.

The mung bean sweet soup was somewhat thick, but the flavor was very light. It was extremely smooth on the palate, and if you paid attention, you could still catch the distinctive aroma of mung beans. The red bean sweet soup was much thinner, but the aged tangerine peel flavor was very strong and completely overpowered the red beans, which felt a bit unbalanced. But when I mixed the red bean and mung bean soups together, they created a unique chemistry. The heavy tangerine peel flavor was nicely mellowed by the mung bean, while the silky texture of the mung bean paired with the red bean and tangerine peel combination in a way that was surprisingly delightful.

Last was the mango pomelo sago. It truly deserves its reputation as one of the gems of Cantonese desserts. The best part of this dessert was that you could not taste any bitterness or tartness from the grapefruit at all; all you got was the sweet-tart flavor of mango and the distinctive texture of the little chewy pearls.

Final Thoughts

Compared with the Italian restaurant that cost RMB 1,800 per person last time, this Chinese restaurant offered much better value if you are not ordering seafood. Having a meal like this inside the legendary historic Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce building was wonderfully relaxing. Whether in terms of the food or the service, Bao Li Xuan absolutely lives up to its 2 Michelin stars.

Can you guess how much this meal cost?

Here’s the answer: after adding the 10% service charge and 6% VAT, the total came to just over RMB 1,000.