Scallion Oil Noodles

01

Noodles, fried scallions and soy sauce

Shanghai scallion oil noodles are a three-ingredient dish: noodles, scallion oil and soy sauce, and the oil does almost all the work.

The noodles are plain wheat noodles, fresh-cut and boiled until springy, drained and put into a bowl dry, with no broth. On top goes a spoonful of scallion oil: vegetable oil in which a large bundle of small scallions has been fried over a low flame until the scallions turn dark brown and brittle and the oil takes on their smell. Soy sauce goes in too, usually both light soy for salt and dark soy for color, often with sugar, and a tangle of the fried scallions is laid over the noodles. You stir it all together at the table.

The fuller version, 葱油开洋拌面, adds 开洋 (kāiyáng), plump dried shrimp softened in rice wine, which bring a sweet, sea-salty depth. The dish looks like almost nothing, a pale heap of noodles under a few blackened strands, but the smell reaches the next table. Fuchsia Dunlop, who writes on Chinese cooking in English, calls it impossible to leave out of any list of Jiangnan dishes, and eats it for breakfast, lunch and late at night.

Sources [1][3][4]

02

“Three liang of conggai”: the name

In Shanghai the dish has a nickname, and using it marks you as a regular.

The full name 葱油开洋拌面 means “scallion oil and dried shrimp tossed noodles.” Shanghainese cut it to two syllables, 葱开 (conggai in Shanghainese), taking the first character of scallion and of dried shrimp. Shen Jialu, a Shanghai food writer, notes that a snack only earns a nickname when it has been around for a long time and everybody knows it. At the old shops, Shen writes, regulars always asked for conggai; anyone who said the full name was not a regular and risked a look from the waitress.

Noodles in Shanghai, like shengjian and wontons, are ordered by the liang, a weight of 50 grams of dry noodles, so “three liang of conggai” is a typical breakfast order. The plain version without shrimp is simply 葱油拌面, and that is what most menus list today.

Sources [1]

03

A City God Temple invention

Every account of the dish begins at the City God Temple, the old heart of Shanghai.

The Shanghai government’s food guide traces the idea of tossed noodles back to the cold noodles of the Tang and Song dynasties, such as 冷淘, and credits the modern dish to a single person: a snack master at the City God Temple named, in its English spelling, Chen Youzhi, in 1889, who is said to have combined southern and northern noodle traditions. No early document is cited for the date. Dunlop repeats the same tradition more cautiously: the dish is said to have been invented by a small vendor near the temple. Either way, scallion oil noodles spread in the early 20th century as Shanghai grew, because they were cheap, quick and needed nothing but a pot of water and a jar of oil.

Sources [3][4]

04

Hubin’s conggai, “its smell carried over the Zigzag Bridge”

For older Shanghainese, the best conggai came from one shop by the temple pond.

Shen Jialu’s choice was the Hubin snack shop (湖滨点心店) in the City God Temple bazaar, next door to the Nanxiang bun shop, in an old building once part of Yu Garden, with a back window over the lotus pond facing the Mid-Lake Pavilion. It used small, slightly wide noodles made to order that stayed springy after boiling. The cooks fried the white parts of small scallions with a little of the thicker Beijing scallion, over a low flame, slowly, and when the old master was frying the oil, visitors on the Zigzag Bridge outside could smell it. That gave the shop its saying: 湖滨葱开面，香飘九曲桥, “Hubin’s conggai, its smell carried over the Zigzag Bridge.” The dried shrimp were that year’s catch, large, soaked in yellow wine and cooked through with light soy sauce.

People queued for it. Shen had a relative who lived in Caojiadu and worked on the Bund and cycled to the temple every morning, in all weather, for a bowl before work, and Shen would skip breakfast before a meeting in Huangpu to have a bowl with a soup of gluten puffs and tofu-skin rolls, a little over ten yuan for both. By the time Shen wrote about it, Hubin had stopped making conggai, and complaints to the management changed nothing. In the book’s preface Shen blames the profit chase: restaurants around the temple all sell crab or matsutake xiaolongbao now, and the cheap scallion oil and dried shrimp noodles have been pushed to the margins.

Not everyone was impressed in Hubin’s heyday. The Taiwanese food writer Lu Yaodong visited in the early 1990s and complained of an oily table and a bowl without a single dried shrimp, much worse, Lu wrote, than the ham and dried shrimp scallion noodles Lu made at home. Shen, who ate there often in those years, thought the visitor was simply prejudiced.

Sources [1]

05

The oil: small scallions, low heat, a lot of patience

Scallion oil is not oil with scallions in it. It is oil that the scallions have been fried out into.

Shanghai uses 小葱, small, thin spring onions, not the thick northern leek-like scallion. They are washed, trimmed and dried well, because water makes the oil spit, then cut into lengths of a few centimeters; Dunlop lightly smashes them with the flat of a knife first. They go into plenty of hot oil and the heat is turned right down. The frying takes a long time on low heat, until the scallions shrink, turn dark brown and crisp, and stop bubbling: too hot and they burn bitter, too short and the oil tastes only of raw onion. Shen insists on good, not too thin scallions and plenty of white part, which carries the most fragrance.

Many cooks then add soy sauce and sugar to the hot oil and let them bubble together, so the sauce and the oil come out of one pot; others keep the soy separate and put it straight into the bowl. Making scallion oil is smoky. Shen jokes that the kitchen looked like a burning oilfield afterwards and earned a scolding at home every time, and one home cook who fried ten jin of scallions in one go needed three hours and three extra bottles of oil. Because it takes so long, most people make a batch: kept in a jar in the fridge it lasts about a week, and Dunlop keeps one ready so a bowl takes ten minutes from frozen noodles.

Sources [1][3][4][6]

06

Kaiyang: the dried shrimp

Dried shrimp turn a plain bowl into the celebrated one.

Shanghai calls them 开洋; northerners say 虾米 and Cantonese speakers 金钩, “golden hooks.” For conggai they should be large, pinkish-orange dried shrimp rather than the paper-thin shrimp skins sold for soup. Shen soaks them in good yellow wine with a little sugar and steams them until soft, then seasons them with soy sauce; Dunlop soaks them in wine and hot water for half an hour and fries them with the scallions until the scallions turn dark. The number of shrimp in a bowl is how Shanghainese judge a shop, and more refined restaurants such as Cang Lang Ting charge more because of them.

Sources [1][3][4]

07

Where to eat them, and what they cost

Scallion oil noodles are still one of the cheapest bowls in Shanghai: 7 yuan at a neighborhood shop in 2026, about 25 at a well-known restaurant.

The Shanghai government’s 2026 guide lists four places across the price range. Huxi Laolongtang (沪西老弄堂面馆) on Dingxi Road, which the guide says has served the dish for more than 40 years counting its earlier stall, charges 7 yuan and is known for generous dried shrimp; Longtang Wonton House (弄堂小馄饨食府) on Weihai Road, which the guide dates to 1980, charges 8 yuan and lets you add a braised pork chop or a fried egg. At Cang Lang Ting (沧浪亭) on Sinan Road, a Suzhou-style noodle house, the bowl with dried shrimp costs 25 yuan, and Jianguo 328 (建国328小馆), a small Shanghainese restaurant, charges 28.

Huang Qifang, writing in 2012, recommended Dingtele (顶特勒粥面馆) near Huaihai Road, open 24 hours and popular after a night out, for its scallion oil noodles and fried pork chop, and for a variation in between scallion oil and sesame noodles: shredded pork in a white sauce made with chicken fat, under scallions roasted soy-brown, on very fine noodles. A home-style restaurant below a block of flats near Jing’an Temple charged 8 yuan a bowl in 2020. In many old lane noodle shops scallion oil noodles are the base of every dish: each bowl starts with scallion oil and soy, and the toppings, from braised pork to kidney or intestines, go on top; some refill the noodles for free.

The Michelin Guide lists one of these old shops, Xiao Tao Mian Guan (小陶面馆) at 222 Jiashan Road in Xuhui. Its inspectors found the tossed noodles, built on a traditional scallion oil base and heaped with crisp fried scallions, more popular than the soup noodles; toppings such as eel and spicy minced pork go on top, extra noodles are free, and there are queues at mealtimes.

Sources [2][4][5][7][8]

08

How to eat scallion oil noodles

A bowl of scallion oil noodles arrives unmixed, and mixing it is your job.

Sources [1][4]

09

Scallion oil noodles and Shanghai’s other plain noodles

Shanghai has several cheap noodles without a topping, and they are not the same thing.

Yangchun noodles (阳春面) are the soup version: plain noodles in a clear broth seasoned with soy and lard, with a little chopped scallion. Sesame noodles (麻酱拌面) are tossed rather than in soup, like scallion oil noodles, but with sesame paste, chili oil and soy; Shen Jialu recommends the decades-old Weixiangzhai on Yandang Road, where a bowl with a small bowl of beef soup cost six yuan when Shen wrote. Above these sit the topping noodles (浇头面) that fill Shanghai menus: stir-fried eel, braised pork, pork chop, three shreds and dozens more.

Sources [1]

10

Scallion oil noodles at home

Sources [1][3][4]

11

More Shanghai, and other tossed noodles