Walking down Fuxing Xi Lu last night, I noticed a crop rotation: Cotton has replaced Arugula. That's Cotton Ding, Hunanese proprietress of . She's been talking about opening a Hunan restaurant, and cheerfully bemoaning the inauthenticity of her home province's food in Shanghai, for years.
Now that has been cleared from the field, she's got a three-story lanehouse in prime expat territory to do just that.
It's going to be called (subtitle: Cotton's Hunan Cuisine). I peeked in the window last night, and she'd done the place up in a deep-red and white scheme, with handsome polished dark wood and a few old-looking pieces of furniture. The decor looks just about ready to go, and the signs are up on both the restaurant and the entrance of the Fuxing Xi Lu lane, so it can't be too long now. A week? Two?
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