Why You’ll Find Shanghai’s Best Lamb Kebabs Outside a Mosque

Shanghai may be home to over 30 Michelin-starred restaurants, glitzy bars with panoramic city views, and chefs serving noodles made with actual gold, but the most exciting food experience in the city is far less flashy.

Every Friday outside the Huxi mosque in the city's Putuo District is a Xinjiang street market.

A Xinjiang food market outside Huxi mosque in Shanghai. All photos by the author.

Xinjiang is China's western most region, a sparsely populated desert larger than continental Europe and home to over 20 of China's 56 ethnic groups. It's the site of the old Silk Road, which had to split in two to skirt the edges of the Taklamakan Desert—an unforgiving expanse of sand roughly the size of Germany.

Among the ethnic groups living in Xinjiang are the Hui and the Uyghurs, both predominantly Muslim.

The proximity of the Xinjiang market to the Huxi mosque means that it attracts Shanghai's Hui and Uyghur communities, their distinguishing feature—language aside—being the hats that they wear. The Hui typically don white skullcaps, while the Uyghurs wear a square black and green doppa. As Muslims, neither group eats pork, so there is none to be found at the market. The staple here is lamb—in every possible incarnation.

Lamb carcasses hanging at the market.

Lamb carcasses hang from hooks as butchers bargain with customers and hack off great hunks of shoulder with giant cleavers. There are countless stalls selling lamb kebabs and the smell of fat rendering on the grill wafts lazily in the Friday morning breeze. There are kang bao, thick bread dumplings filled with lamb and cooked in a tandoor oven. The lamb fat soaks into the bread, which is soft on the inside but has a crunchy outer surface. Then there are lamb sheng jian bao, which is where Xinjiang really meets Shanghai. The Shanghai-style shallow-fried dumplings are filled with lamb in place of the traditional pork.

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