Anyone looking for a bit of entertainment or foodie satisfaction while on a layover in Shanghai will need to look well beyond the confines of the airport. Pudong’s international airport may be a huge, mostly gleaming, modern space, but it has some of the most overpriced, bland food and off-brand shopping with little to do beyond making repeated attempts to connect to the free Wi-Fi.

[Editor's note: We're sorry to report that Harbin Dumplings has closed.] Walk along just about any street in Shanghai these days, and you’ll see an ever-encroaching range of Western brands, standardized brand signage and food franchises. As in other rapidly developing countries, the battle for consumer dollars and brand loyalty has meant more chains and mass-produced food. That’s partly what makes stepping into one of the several Liu Family Harbin Dumplings shops a breath of fresh air. Every morning until the lunch rush, the dining room and back rooms are set up with trays and workers dexterously making every dumpling from start to finish. Dumpling wrappers are meticulously hand-rolled, the fillings are mixed in large batches, and the time-consuming process of filling and closing the dumplings marches on until tray upon tray is ready for boiling – but not until they’re ordered during the lunch rush.

Shanghai is famous for its swampy summer weather, and although this August was the coolest in 14 years, it’s still hot and humid out there as we head into Indian summer. Staying hydrated against the rising mercury is crucial if you’re out hunting a meal of street food, so here are the best sips to keep your yin and yang balanced this season. Mia’s Green Apple Mint Juice This neighborhood Yunnan specialty restaurant takes bold flavors from southwest China and elevates them in simple combinations. In many of their noodle and main dishes, mint features prominently - there is even a salad composed entirely of mint leaves that will leave you wondering why anyone is even bothering with iceberg lettuce. By supercharging fresh apple juice with a fistful of pressed mint leaves, Mia’s makes the idea of a juice cleanse just a teensy bit more appealing.

Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节, zhōngqiūjié) lands on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, relatively near the autumnal equinox; in 2014, it falls on September 5. Also sometimes called Mooncake Festival, it is a public holiday in China and Taiwan on which families gather to give offerings to the full moon, float sky lanterns and eat mooncakes (月饼, yuèbing). A culinary tradition with legendary roots, mooncakes are sold everywhere from grocery stores to five-star hotels and come with competing origin stories that relate how these sweets came to represent the holiday.

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Strict vegetarians in Shanghai face a double-edged sword when it comes to staying meat-free. On the one hand, the country’s large Buddhist population means they are in good company. It is estimated that the total number of vegetarians in China reached about 50 million last year. However, while tofu dishes can be found on just about every Chinese menu, that doesn’t mean that the dishes are strictly meat-free. To vegetarians’ dismay, pork and meat-based broths are often used to give the soy-based dishes more flavor, and special requests (even simple ones like “no meat”) are not usually complied with (or understood). Traditionally, meat is often sliced in very thin strips (肉丝, ròu sī) and used to flavor vegetable and tofu dishes, as opposed to being the star

Dear Culinary Backstreets, I’ve heard some horror stories about food safety scandals in China. How does an adventurous eater explore Shanghai without having any culinary misadventures? There’s no hiding the fact that recent years have seen the highly publicized exposure of some unsavory information on China’s food safety record. While the headlines may not be any worse than those seen recently in other countries (whether unlabeled horse meat or fecal matter in ground turkey), the Chinese lately have reached appalling levels of creativity in their food scandals, from thousands of diseased pigs washing up in the Huangpu River, to rat, fox and mink meat being pawned off as lamb at hotpot restaurants.

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