The Barbie Cafe has a new 40rmb lunch set menu available Monday - Friday from 11:30am - 2:30pm. While you're here, sign up for our loyalty card and be elligble for a free lunch and lucky draw prizes!

New Eats | Pink is Good

The Barbie Café is perched like a gleaming crown atop Shanghai’s new six-floor Barbie mecca. Culinary heavyweight David Laris has built a slyly lovable destination. Our inner 8-year-old enjoyed the attention to detail, from the herringbone tiled floor to the whimsical check holders. The pan-European menu, spiked with Asian influences, has classic BLTs (¥45) alongside five-spice tofu bread salad (¥40).

We liked the charming wait staff too. With Barbie’s anatomically impossible proportions, she’d go for the Fashionista salad. Unfortunately the watercress, fennel and Mandarin orange slices were drenched in an underwhelming vinaigrette. Things looked up with ravioli stuffed with a silky sweet pumpkin filling (¥65). It was as luscious as Ken’s molded locks. We washed down our happiness with a lime green Malibu Barbie cocktail (¥55) which brought us back to lazy afternoons at the beach. The Barbie burger (¥60) with “pink sauce” (basically a colored mayo) was classic American diner fare done right. It was surprisingly good–we even overlooked how much the pink sauce looked like donut icing.

But much of the dessert menu wasn’t available and the chocolate coconut cake was bland. The taro flavored Shanghai Lynn gelato (¥18 a scoop) pleased our tastebuds. We loved the packaging of Barbie Café, but the food quality was uneven.

Lingbo Li