In a private dining room at the Deda, head chef Lu Xiaozhou is chatting enthusiastically about sous-vide cooking and molecular gastronomy. An earnest, bespectacled man of 32, he’s been working in this Shanghai restaurant since he was 18 years old. But while he’s au fait with contemporary culinary trends, Lu is a specialist in a unique local genre: Shanghainese “western food”. The restaurant’s full name is Deda Western Food Society, a reference to the German entrepreneur who founded it in 1897, combined with a 19th-century Shanghainese term for western cooking, “great cuisine”. We meet over cups of milky tea in the private dining room on the top floor, which is decked out in vintage European style with an elaborate mantelpiece and a wind-up gramophone.

You can eat practically anything in Shanghai these days, from authentic Spanish tapas and Italian pizza, to modernist cuisine by the likes of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Paul Pairet. Yet locals have an enduring affection for their own “western food”, the legacy of dishes brought to the city by foreigners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Deda signature dishes include a local version of borscht (luosong tang, “Russian soup”) made with tomatoes rather than beetroot; pork schnitzel with a dip of “hot soy sauce”, a Shanghainese homage to Worcestershire sauce which bears no relation to actual soy sauce; “Portuguese chicken” in curried cheese béchamel; and a Russian-style potato salad made with mayonnaise and dotted with morsels of sausage, carrot and peas. A hefty platter of cured pork and sausages with gherkins harks back to the tastes of the restaurant’s German founder.

The food recalls an era when foreigners swanned around in extraterritorial concessions that had been extracted at gunpoint from the Qing Dynasty government in the treaties that followed the opium wars. The city was a free port so visas were not required. There were British, Americans, French, Japanese and Germans, among others. Impoverished White Russians fled here after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Later, the rise of Hitler saw an influx of European Jews. The foreigners recreated the west around them, with dance halls and cocktail bars, delicatessens and restaurants, European-style mansions and the grand riverfront buildings of the Bund.