Shanghai fried pork chop, and the sauce that makes it

The Shanghai fried pork chop (炸猪排, zhá zhū pái) is the one dish in a Shanghai wonton shop that isn't a wonton. It is a pork chop, tenderised, breaded and fried until crisp — and eaten with a thin, tart, dark sauce called lajiangyou (辣酱油).

It is also, quietly, one of the most international dishes in China.

Vienna → Japan → Shanghai

The breaded cutlet starts in Austria, as the Wiener Schnitzel. It travelled east and took root in Japan as tonkatsu. And when Shanghai's port opened in 1843, it arrived here too, reworked by the city's Western-style restaurants into a "Viennese pork chop" — which slowly became the Shanghai fried pork chop everyone knows today.

So if you've eaten a schnitzel in Vienna or a tonkatsu in Tokyo, you already understand the idea. The differences are in the details: a Shanghai pork chop is usually pounded thinner and fried harder than tonkatsu, with a coarser, crunchier crumb.

And the sauce is a journey of its own

Here's the part that surprises people: lajiangyou is not soy sauce. Despite the name — it literally reads "spicy soy sauce" — it descends from Worcestershire sauce, first made in Worcester, England, and known in Cantonese as gip zap (喼汁).

In 1933, a Shanghai company took the British sauce and made a local version of it. Another local maker refined it further into the yellow-label bottle that Shanghai households still keep in the cupboard. It is thinner and sharper than a Japanese tonkatsu sauce, with a faint prickle of heat — exactly what cuts through the richness of a fried pork chop.

	Japanese tonkatsu	Shanghai fried pork chop
Cutlet	Thicker, juicier	Pounded thinner, crisper
Sauce	Thick, sweet, fruit-based	Thin, tart, Worcestershire-style
Eaten with	Shredded cabbage, rice	On its own, or beside wontons

What "lajiangyou" actually tastes like

Thin, dark, tangy — closer to a British brown sauce than to anything soy-based. Vinegar-forward, lightly spiced, a little sweet at the end. Pour it into a small dish and dip. That's it. No one will stop you from putting it straight on the chop.

How to eat it well

• Dip, don't drown. A shallow dish on the side is traditional.
• Eat it hot. The crumb softens fast.
• Pair it with wontons. This is the classic Shanghai combination — a bowl of soup wontons and a pork chop to share.

Where to try one

Míng Chéng serves one pork chop, cooked to order, alongside eight kinds of big wonton — RMB 15 for a single chop, or as part of a set with a bowl of assorted wontons.