Getting ‘Misty’ at Shanghai’s Peace Hotel

by St. John Frizell

for epicurious.com

The Peace Hotel stands at Shanghai's most famous intersection, where the department stores of Nanjing Road meet the magnificent colonial buildings of the Bund at the banks of the Huangpu River. When it was built in 1929, the hotel's north building was known as the Cathay Hotel, and it attracted the world's most discerning guests-Noel Coward reportedly wrote "Private Lives" in one of its opulent suites. Tourists seeking remnants of Shanghai's colonial past will marvel at the spectacular Art Deco lobby-and just off that lobby is the Peace Hotel Jazz Bar.

    The bar is an "English-style" Mock Tudor pub, with decorative half-timbers lining the plastered ceiling and walls, gloomily lit by brass chandeliers-a place to enjoy a "tankard of beer," as the hotel's literature suggests. Every night at 8:00, the low-ceilinged room fills with the same people who can afford the rooms upstairs: Japanese businessmen in dark business suits and middle-aged European tourists-all here to see the Old Jazz Band.

    It's not just the music that's old about this sextet-the youngest of the Chinese gentlemen on the bandstand is 65; the oldest is 88. Starkly silhouetted against a brightly lit white wall, the wrinkled musicians lumber through a list of standards, requested by customers for 30 RMB a piece (about $3.75)-songs like "Brazil," "Misty" and "Slow Boat to China"-while a few older couples on the dance floor tentatively try to remember the foxtrot. Like a warped 78-rpm record played on a rusted gramophone, each number starts with an unexpected jerk and plays for a few noisy minutes until it shudders, and is done.

    The service at the bar is slow and contemptuous. The drinks, when finally delivered by a scowling waiter, are lukewarm and of dubious quality; the principal ingredient in the bar's signature drink, the Peace Cocktail, is Chinese white wine. The prices, even after the hefty cover charge, are outrageous even by inflated tourist-trap standards.

    But somehow, at the Jazz Bar, all these wrongs make a right. When the Jazz Bar opened in 1980, it was an imitation of a Shanghai bar from the romantic days between the wars, when Shanghai bars in turn imitated European clubs. In trying to construct an environment where its Western guests would feel at home, the Peace Hotel has created a space as familiar to Westerners as chop suey would be to a Shanghai native: the jazz bar, seen through a funhouse mirror. The effect is alienating and utterly foreign, yet strangely intoxicating-and one can imagine that's how the tourist's ancestor, the Jazz Age colonialist, felt about places like this too.  

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    All around the Peace Hotel, China is struggling to reinvent its tourism industry at breakneck speed. Just as the Chinese economy increasingly resembles Western capitalism, so each new hotel and restaurant is more generically "Continental" than the last. The Peace Hotel Jazz Bar, seemingly despite its efforts, is a reminder of a time when Chinese and Western cultures did not rub up against each other as smoothly as they do now--just listen to that band play "Brazil."