The relative abundance of heritage architecture and mixed zoning in the former French Concession neighborhood (technically the Xuhui district) has left a legacy of nooks and crannies where a number of mom-and-pop noodle shops are able to withstand the test of time and pressures of a fast-changing economy. Luckily, enough noodle lovers are still craving the classics and will queue up to support their favorite local haunts. Our top five picks can get crowded, but if you avoid the main lunch rush from noon to 1 p.m., you shouldn’t have to fight (too hard) for a seat.

Search online for Shanghai’s best fried dumplings, and you’ll come up with hundreds of results extolling Yang’s Fried Dumplings. Though it was once just a humble shop sandwiched between the Bund and People’s Square, the online renown and ensuing crowds have propelled the brand into chain-store ubiquity, populating new malls and shopping streets with fervor. In essence, they’ve become the Starbucks of dumplings; you’re going to get a relatively consistent product, but come on, you can do so much better! Enter Yang Yang’s.

Mall dining in Asia is nothing like its American counterpart, thanks mostly to the humid climates of Singapore and Hong Kong. These two islands have tunnels and bridges connecting malls throughout the cities, making them easy to traverse while staying inside the air-conditioned environment. When temperatures spike – as they do on most days – crowds flock to the malls; the restaurants have followed suit. You can eat everything from excellent snack food to Michelin-starred meals in malls in Hong Kong and Singapore. But what does all that have to do with Shanghai?

In & Out arrived in Beijing years ago to rave reviews, but the Yunnan restaurant only just settled in Shanghai, confusing homesick Californians with its name. Instead of Double-Double burgers and Animal-Style fries, it serves cross-the-bridge noodles (过桥米线, guòqiáo mǐxiàn) and fried potato balls (土豆球, tǔdòu qiú). While most Yunnan restaurants in China span the whole province’s cuisine, from tea leaf salads to crispy adzuki beans, In & Out’s menu is (mostly) specific to Lijiang, a city deemed a UNESCO heritage site that lies about halfway between Shangri-La and Kunming, the provincial capital, and is home to the Naxi and several other ethnic minorities.

Healthy eating and Chinese food are often hard to combine, but Karen Chen has discovered the recipe. After the success of Jianguo 328 (a homestyle Shanghainese restaurant that forgoes MSG and uses filtered water to boil its excellent noodles), the Taiwanese restaurateur decided to look west – where spice is king – for her next venture: Yi Zhang Hong. The friendly Sichuan restaurant is cobbled together with a narrow staircase leading up to cheerful dining rooms over three floors. On each level, bright folk art hangs on white walls above long banquettes and blond wood tables, and the red-tiled bar on the first floor is decorated with bottles of imported wine and beer and canisters of local tea.

Bāozi (包子), or steamed buns, are a basic, on-the-go meal. It’s rare to come across a shop selling these buns for more than 1.5 RMB (US$0.25), and yet, the past five years have seen a dramatic rise in the stature of this humble dish – thanks mostly to celebrity chef David Chang, whose Momofuku pork bun has become world-famous. They even got a domestic boost in 2013, when President Xi Jinping visited a local 60-year-old baozi shop in Beijing. (Now, thanks to an hours-long queue to try the “President Special,” that chain is looking to go public.) Legend has it that baozi date back to the Three Kingdoms period (A.D. 220-280) and are credited to Zhuge Liang, a renowned military strategist who was also an eccentric foodie. He invented both this steamed bun and our favorite breakfast treat: the jianbing

For years, expats in Shanghai complained about the lack of quality desserts in the city. Perhaps they just meant familiar desserts, as locals were more than happy to point them to delicious egg tarts, mooncakes or Taiwanese iced treats. But alas, when it came to sweets, there seemed to be a Great Wall-sized divide between East and West. In an effort to bring together sweet tooths from both sides of the dessert dividing line, in 2010 Lexie Comstock started Strictly Cookies, an American-style cookie delivery company in Shanghai that she hoped would delight expats and win over locals along the way. Having first visited China in 2000 while in middle school, Comstock later plunged into studying Mandarin and majoring in East Asian Studies at Harvard.

Dunlop is a cook and food writer specializing in Chinese cuisine. She is the author of four books, including, most recently, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking. She has won many awards for her work, including four James Beard awards, an IACP award, four awards from the British Guild of Food Writers and an award from the Hunan government. Her writing has been published in the Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Observer and The New York Times, and she is also a frequent pundit on Chinese food on BBC radio and television, as well as many other media outlets.

One of China’s most successful franchise stories comes from Putian, a coastal city in Fujian with a population of about 3 million. The province is probably known best for the many who leave it, especially those who have been smuggled into the United States by snakeheads, and including domestic emigrants who move to hub cities, bringing their culinary traditions along with them.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment of our recurring feature, First Stop, we asked Lillian Chou, former food editor of Gourmet and now a freelance writer in Beijing, where she heads first for food when she arrives in Shanghai. There are several factors that decide where I eat first when I arrive in Shanghai – mostly, it’s whether I’m alone or with friends and what kind of eaters they are and how much time we have.

Girdled by the South China Sea, the islands and peninsula that make up Hong Kong have had to grow up rather than out. This geographical constraint has resulted in more than twice as many skyscrapers as any other city in the world (1,251 and counting), and many of those high-rises house malls jam-packed with some of the best restaurants in the city. Now the trend of dining out amongst designer shops is heading north to Shanghai, as developers erect facsimiles of Hong Kong’s favorite malls on both sides of the Huangpu River. At IAPM, the latest shopping spot stocked with HK brands to open its doors to Shanghai, it seems fitting that Tao Heung is one of the most popular spots in the foodie and shopping mecca.

Ask a Shanghainese person for the best běnbāng, or local, restaurant in town, and you’ll probably be pointed toward Old Jesse. The doyenne of haipai cuisine, this ramshackle restaurant is the darling of the guidebook industry, with mentions in publications from Travel + Leisure to Lonely Planet, but that doesn’t mean that it’s foreigner-friendly. In fact, when LP first published their listing back in 2008, Old Jesse stopped taking reservations in English for some time, just to spite the hordes of tourists vying for a seat in their tiny former French Concession establishment. Even now, the lingua franca in the packed dining room is Shanghainese, and it’s still not uncommon for a laowai’s reservations to disappear if he or she is just a few minutes late, or for foreigners to have to watch hungrily as the dishes they ordered come out to tables manned by locals first, even though said locals were seated long after them.

Healthy hotpot sounds like a contradiction in terms, which is probably why Elixir doesn’t even use “hotpot” in its name. Instead it labels itself “health pot” in English, or无老锅 (wúlǎoguō － “No Aging Pot”) in Chinese. Its fountain-of-youth claims are touted by celebrities across Asia, from Mando-Pop’s reigning dancing queen Jolin Tsai to K-Pop crossover star Choi Siwon. Originally from Taiwan, an island that has been ruled by both the Chinese and Japanese in the past century, the restaurant pulls from both Asian countries’ delicious hotpot cultures and holistic medicine traditions to create its menu.