I always thought you had to be one of those long established, extravagantly priced, we-don’t-really-serve-your-kind-here restaurants to be snooty and dismissive. Not if you’re The Fat Olive’s maitre d’ (if that’s what they’re called these days). Nope. Then you just wait till you’re barely past the embryonic phase of the restaurant’s life cycle before bringing out your alter-ego: Captain Curt.

On Thursday afternoon, we made a reservation for Friday night, for 3 people. Come Friday afternoon, both my would-be dinner companions canceled on me. Since I still planned on being hungry around 7, I called The FO and told them it would just be me. Below is as close to a transcript as we are going to get:

Me: Hi, this is Susan James (That’s right, I fake name restaurants) I’d booked a table for 3 people tonight
Phone Guy: Yes…
Me: Well, it’s just going to be me – I’d like to change it to a table for one
PG: I’m sorry, we don’t take single person bookings
Me: Sure, but I’m not making a booking, I’m amending an existing booking. You had already reserved my table, right?
PG: Yes, but I can’t hold a table for 1.
You: Oh, you won’t have to hold it, I’m pretty punctual. I’ll be there at 7.
PG: I’m sorry, but we don’t do that-
Me: Let me get this straight: If I come there by myself, at 7pm on the dot, you are saying that you’ll refuse to serve me?
PG: No, of course not. Of course not. Of course not. Of course not.

That’s right. I watched Frasier. I know that dining alone, though a little bit sad, is well within the bounds of proper etiquette.

On to the good stuff. The FO’s staff, the ones who don’t answer the phone, are fantastic. One waitress, Linda, was really charming, and friendly. She even knew all the ingredients in baklava (the other dessert choice was semolina). The description of baklava sounded truly awful but I was so impressed with her upsell I ordered some anyway. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t like it. But that’s was nothing to do with the food, it’s just what happens when a person who hates nutty or sweet things orders a dish made of nuts and sugar. Nicely done, Linda.

Service: Ashtrays were changed regularly. Desserts delivered promptly. We ended up sharing a table with another couple and between us we probably ordered about 10 glasses of wine. Two of those had to be reordered because the waitress forgot but both times she was very apologetic and, on a Friday night, it can happen to anyone.

Menu: Greek is not my thing so I really can’t say. Is pita supposed to be oily and bing-like in texture? I didn’t expect the bread to have been fried but it did taste good, despite my arteries’ protestations.

Wine: This was delicious. And at 38RMB a glass, it made it very easy to fall in love with all things FO. I was a little disappointed that they’d already run out of house red when we got there. Isn’t that kind of like George Clooney running out of charisma just before a date? Of the wines (Argentinean) they did have, we drank the Bodega Norton Malbec (38RMB) and the Lo Tengo (34RMB, I think – by this time we got to this one my note-taking powers had been acutely diminished)

Toilets: Sparkly, spacious and clean

Vibe: Mellow music. No frantic wait staff rushing around. You don’t have to yell to talk to each other and it feels like one of those scenes in the movies when a bunch of people are hanging out by the lake, there’s much laughter, merriment and clinking of glasses and then suddenly a body surfaces in the water and some shrieky drama student starts screaming. The corpse and hysteria bit, thankfully, didn’t happen. Just Morcheeba-esque tunes, the obligatory summery jazz anthem (Girl from Ipanema Pt.2,000,676) and people decompressing after a Shanghai week. We all know how those can go.
People-watching: Has a little of that self-congratulating vibe that I dislike so much about everything along the Bund. But the absence of a dress code – boys in shorts and flip-flops, girls in wafting summer dresses and cheery smiles – means that there’s a breezy balance between the posers and the…er…the non-poseurs.

Verdict: It’s nothing you haven’t seen before and they can probably get rid of the half used bags of cement piled up in one corner of the patio. But all in all I really liked the service. The prices are more than reasonable and there are worse ways to spend an evening than lounging around on plush white sofas drinking in the balmy Shanghai breeze and indulging a little bit of oenophilia with your friends.

6/F, Silver Court Building
228 Xizhang Nan Lu,
near Huaihai Lu

Reservations: 6334 3288

etiquette, george clooney, Greek food, maitre d, restaurant, shanghai