With Easter upon us, it’s time to pay homage to the humble egg. So often it plays best supporting actor, so rarely is it star of the show, and yet without it, where would we be? No cakes, custard, or quiche. No meringue or mayonnaise. Heck, no breakfast fry-ups even–what would be the point? So in its honor, I have scoured Shanghai in search of people who are giving our oval friend the recognition it deserves, in search of the most innovative and imaginative egg dishes out there.

For presentation, and pure egg-tastic fun, you can’t beat Stiller’s three-egg starter (¥140). Using the shells as mini-bowls, each one contains a hollandaise, individually flavoured. Make sure to eat the from left to right as the tastes intensify as you progress. First up, the warm hollandaise is delicately flavoured with a morel mushroom foam and textured with young leeks. Next comes truffle with celeriac mash. The earthy truffle, crispy croutons and creamy hollandaise give a wonderful texture–a pleasure to eat. The final and most decadent of the trio is a diced scallop hollandaise topped with lobster foam and served with caviar-laden toast. Salty, creamy, fishy ... delicious.

Now, I always thought preparing the perfect soft-boiled egg was simple–four minutes in boiling water. Not so, says Guillermo Willy Trullas Moreno, the man behind el Willy. This maverick chef cooks his eggs for 15 minutes and doesn’t boil them at all! Willy uses a sous vide technique to brew them at 65 degrees Celcius. Sous vide is a sort of posh boil-in-the-bag technique where foods can be slow cooked at low temperatures.

Though Willy is by no means the first chef to do this, his results are pretty special–the 65 degree eggs at el Willy are so popular they have their own section on his tapas menu. On offer are eggs with porcini mushrooms and Kobe beef (¥258), eggs with foie gras and Chinese truffle (¥170) and eggs with 36-month-aged Iberian ham (¥180). I have tried them all and they are all spectacularly delicious. By using a lower temperature, the egg white cooks, but doesn’t become rubbery. The yolk is perfectly runny and somehow the slow cooking gives it an ambrosial depth of flavour.

Another egg dish that caught my eye was at Va Bene. Here Michelin-starred chef Corrado Michelazzo cooks his eggs inside a prawn. He freezes the yolk of a quail’s egg, inserts it into a giant juicy prawn and then rolls it in batter before frying. The egg then cooks within. The beauty of this dish is that the egg is a scrummy, runny hidden surprise, waiting to burst out when you cut into your prawn.

It’s a well-known fact that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, but these restaurants are showing us that an omelette is only the start.