If you're planning on splurging, Shanghai's got options. Lots of options. The city is your oyster – a foie gras, caviar and sea urchin topped oyster, served with a flute of champagne. 

So, be it a souped-up date night to impress, a special occasion celebration, or just a downright need to go all out, if you're looking to lavishly indulge in life's finer things, that just so happen to also be edible things, here are three food-centric, stellar options for putting that money to good use.

Check out Part I here. 

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon

Powerhouse French chef Joël Robuchon's maiden voyage into Shanghai, L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon serves Michelin star-worthy French cuisine in an ultra-luxe Bund environment, with a bill to match at the end.

For a man with more Michelin stars to his name than he has fingers and toes, (Robuchon holds 25 at his restaurants around the world) you might just leave feeling it was money well spent.

While the restaurant does offer an expansive a la carte menu, the bread and butter are the set menus which – curiously enough – begin with Joël Robuchon's world renowned bread assortment and branded butter.

The sets change at the will of the chef and seasonality of ingredients, sometimes more than once a month, with a lunch set going for RMB688 + 10% service charge and the dinner set at RMB1,498 for five courses or RMB1,798 for seven courses + 10% service charge.

We checked out the Lunch Menu Degustation to provide an example of what you can expect – and also to fill our tummies with arguably the best French food in town. 

A signature Joël Robuchon dish, the Foie Gras Royale is modest in color, but anything but that in rich flavor. A tiered glass is layered first with foie gras yogurt followed by a tart port wine reduction, stacked with a nutty parmesan emulsion foam.

Le Saumon is classic in both presentation and rustic comfort – a smoked salmon carpaccio is studded with cubed avocado, chives, beads of caviar, a gasp of lemon dressing and crisp potato tuille for that necessary crunch. 

Ideal for autumn, La Chataigne is a lush chestnut velouté – one of the mother sauces of French cuisine made from a roux and light stock. The confit chestnuts act as the base of the broth, poured over pancetta and braised chestnut cubes, a fresh herb salad and tangy, cold sorrel cream. 

A perfectly pan-seared scallop is embellished with minced ginger and chives as La Saint-Jacques. Swimming in a pool of turmeric spiced curry yogurt, the coconut foam adds an extra layer of unctuousness. 

Served with Joël Robuchon’s famously buttery mashed potatoes, Le Parmentier de Canard is akin to the most extravagant take on a shepherd’s pie. Shredded confit duck is topped with seared roughly mashed potatoes and an herb salad, all drizzled with a chicken jus reduction – the kind of food just asking to be eaten while curled up by the fireplace. 

Like a French play on mango sticky rice, Le Riz Au Lait is a dense rice pudding dotted with fresh globes of mango, crowned with a quenelle of Tahitian vanilla ice cream, caramelized peanut brittle and a hot cognac caramel sauce. Without being overly sweet, this dessert appeases dessert dabblers and fiends alike. 

The meal ultimately concludes with more of what Robuchon is famous for, petite fours in the form of more nibble-worthy sweets – an airy macaroon, a crunchy almond chocolate, a dainty green tea madeleine and a bright lemon tart. 

Fu He Hui

Extending over three floors of private dining rooms on Yuyuan Lu, Fu He Hui is a premium destination serving the very best in vegetarian fine dining. This 1-Michelin star, modern Chinese vegetarian restaurant houses an opulent but minimalistic, Zen-like ambience, serving meat-free creations by head chef Tony Lu.

The place pays the highest respect to quality seasonal ingredients from across the country – such as Yunnan eggplant, Guangdong daikon and Jiangxi bamboo – and presents them through artistic presentation involving time-honored methods of preparation and cooking techniques.

At Fu He Hui, only set menus are served, and they change seasonally to highlight the best of local ingredients, matched with regional teas to enhance the natural flavors. The menu is the same for lunch or dinner, a series of 10 courses for RMB880 – each focusing on one key vegetable, fruit or flower – with an optional tea pairing for an additional RMB298. 

The current season’s menu focuses on colder weather flora, emphasizing tastes that accent heartier dishes for the more frigid months. Starting out with a Suzhou dish of Eight Treasures – bite size delicacies of gorgon seed, celery, arrowhead, lotus root, water chestnut, water shield, water caltrop and zizania are lined up in order of boldness in flavor and color, preparing the palate for the natural flavors to come. 

The tea pairing begins with the most fragrant of the teas, brewed from a perfume lotus (xiang shui lian), emitting a sweet buttercup flavor with a hint of ginger.

Starting out with a nod to the passing of summer, the Snap Pea is all things green – pickled olive, string bean peas and Brussels sprouts leaves. But, lurking beneath the shadows, sits a bright red pimento dressing, waiting to add a zing of piquant sweetness to the plate. 

After preserving in a sweet vinegar brine, the Eggplant is roasted until unctuous, a plushness that melts on the tongue when combined with a soft tofu sauce and a dribble of perilla flower oil on which the phallically-shaped aubergine rests. 

Mei choy – a type of pickled Chinese mustard green typically eaten with pork belly – is dried, powdered and pressed into sheets that encase the meat-mimicking roasted Porcini mushrooms. Laden with homemade cheese and sprinkled with pistachio dust, the springy mushrooms make diners forget the dish is fully grown, rather than raised, from the earth.

Stacked tall with scallop-patterned walls, a tower of Daikon rests in a pool of coix seed – Job’s tears aka Chinese pearl barley – soup, seasoned lightly with miso and ginger. The green outer layers are made from Shandong fruit daikon while the white, jelly-like interior is based in Guangdong daikon.  

Steamed in brassica – another type of cruciferous mustard green – as it is done in Guangdong cuisine, the crunchy Jiangxi Bamboo Shoot sits alongside Yunnan chestnut, steeped in flavors commonly used to make a hongshaorou sauce, radiating a supple sweet tanginess.

Steeped in a red date, mushroom and herb broth, the Mushroom Tea sees baton-like youtiao come together with mountain yam (shan yao) black garlic, domed black morel mushrooms and green pepper oil for a comfortably earthy sip to pair with a rounded Oolong tea. 

The heartiest of collection, the Green Squash is cooked with Xinjiang-grown clay-pot rice, dense Sichuan pumpkin and nori seaweed, a juxtaposition of crispy rice kernels and buttery dense squash to keep diners coming back for a second helping.  

Delicate in both consistency and aroma, the Yunnan Rose ice cream is made from fresh rose petals contrasted with a salted cone. 

Sweet Potato

Hailing from Lanzhou, the Lily Bulb is steamed in sweet-smelling jasmine flowers until it has a texture like spreadable, roasted garlic and then showered with a light sugar syrup, served alongside an equally floral tea. 

The Pine

Located in the sprawling grounds of the InterContinental Ruijin Shanghai, The Pine is Light & Salt's upscale tasting menu venture. The place is helmed by Singaporean Chef Jia Wei Lee, previously of Odette, acclaimed as No. 2 Asia’s 50 Best Restaurant and No. 8 World’s 50 Best Restaurant. 

Chef Jia Wei originally specialized in the cuisine of France, so bridges French techniques with Chinese flavors, taking the essence of a particular plate and using that as the backbone for something ingenious.

The current Prestige autumn menu hones in on Sichuan, highlighting the region in both flavors and products.

The meal begins with an amuse bouche of asparagus, confit egg yolk and Sichuan caviar, followed by a toned-down version of guaiweiji – or ‘strange-flavored’ chicken – a Sichuan seasoning that incorporates a multitude of tastes (spicy, salty, sesame, sour and sweet) perched atop a brittle, sweetened stroopwafel flecked with refreshing cucumber slivers.

Another amuse bouche is a terrine of Chinese pickles – watermelon skin, Jerusalem artichokes, daikon and beans; a refined palate cleanser that prepares diners for what’s to come.

Next arrives the Celtuce, a white gazpacho of sorts, utilizing young celtuce from Sichuan’s upper highland region in various forms – crunchy circular discs, shaved ribbons and, most notably, a cooling quenelle of sorbet.

This humble produce is accented by a Sichuan walnut gazpacho and the antioxidant-filled yacon root, both pickled and as a dolloped mousse. 

We learned not so long ago that Shanghai’s obsession with foie gras has afforded the ingredient many uses, but chef Jia Wei has found a trio of new presentations with his Foie Gras Three Ways.

A journey in both temperature and texture starts with a cold foie gras bon bon – lush whipped foie gras and plum wine encased in a white chocolate coating, studded with dots of honey and peach. 

Next, a foie gras brûlée is topped with a warm mapo tofu sauce, trailed by a play on kaishui baicai, a steamed Chinese cabbage consommé poured over foie gras so it emulsifies into the rich broth. The result is a most comforting fall soup.

The foie gras enhances each bite, really serving a purpose to better each dish rather than just adding another expensive ingredient on the plate. 

READ MORE: Bargain, Balanced, Ballin': 20 Foie Gras Dishes For All Budgets

Perhaps one of Sichuan’s most famed specialties, laziji – or spicy chicken – is prepared instead as Lazi Pigeon, a fowl commonly used in French cuisine. First presented Cantonese style, the bird is exalted for its taut, crisp skin that gives way to juicy, tender meat. 

Using a chili blend fully sourced from Chengdu, the pigeon is served with a purée of yellow capsicum and caramelized miso for extra scorch. 

An M7 Rangers Valley Wagyu Striploin is glazed with a garlic soy jus made from sesame oil, garlic and hongyu chili oil, prepared using French methods but with Sichuan flavors. Smoky, charred aubergine cake is dotted with burnt chili, while a horseradish purée highlights yet another of the many Sichuan spices, known as jiela, or mustard spice. 

A thoughtful play on suancaiyu, the Coral Trout arrives in a bowl floating atop pickled mustard greens and puffed crispy rice. Laced with Hainan yellow chilis, huajiao and majiao, the aromatic citrus notes from peppercorns elevate each sip. 

Deserts span traditional to modern. First, a Bingfen (made using hand-ground powder to form the jelly) with fresh melon globes, sticky rice cakes and brown sugar syrup is topped with a cold hawthorn berry granita – instead of the customary shaved ice – adorned with fresh elderflower. 

Concluding the meal, a deconstructed Lemon Tart – featuring Sichuan lemons and green tea – is piped with dollops of lemon curd, burnt meringue crisps and green tea sorbet with finger lime beads, all resting on a lemon and thyme compote.

The menu changes quarterly. This is not just to focus on seasonal ingredients, but also to explore varying regions of China, highlighting the diverse flavors and time-honored dishes of particular provincial fare.

Diners can choose from the Gourmet Set or the Prestige Set (both RMB1,397), both with seven courses and a wine pairing recommendation for an additional RMB797.

These two menus are culled down at lunch time and priced at RMB397 and RMB597 respectively. All prices are subject to a 10% service charge, and set menu bookings should be made in advance.

See a listing for The Pine.

READ MORE: Splurge-worthy Sets: HIYA, Da Vittorio, 8 ½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana