The Experience
Sir Elly's sits on the 13th floor of The Peninsula Shanghai at Bund 32 — the northern end of the Bund, directly opposite the river's great bend where the Huangpu sweeps east toward Pudong. The view, in practice, is the single most complete Bund-and-skyline composition available from any dining room in Shanghai. The restaurant takes its name from Sir Victor Sassoon, whose family made the city the financial hub of interwar East Asia; the reference is appropriate. This room is built for people who want to feel they are at the centre of things.
Chef de Cuisine Eugenio Cannoni runs the kitchen. His CV is serious — a Michelin-starred debut at Moss in Iceland, La Scala at the Sukhothai in Bangkok, and Ca' Vittoria in Italy before Shanghai — and the cooking here reflects it. Sir Elly's was reconceived in recent years as a "reimagined Northern Italian" kitchen, and Cannoni's menus move between orthodox Piemontese and Lombardian dishes and more lateral preparations informed by his time in Asia. The kitchen has held its Michelin star through multiple guide cycles.
The room itself is intimate by Peninsula standards — two connected spaces finished in warm wood, bronze and velvet, with a wraparound window line that turns the view into wallpaper. One floor above, Sir Elly's Terrace is the open-air cocktail bar that most locals associate with the name: a hard-to-beat vantage for an aperitif before or a digestif after the meal. Service is Peninsula-level — which is to say among the most composed and intuitive in the city.
Per-person spend runs ¥900–1,800 for dinner à la carte, more with the wine pairing and the tasting menu. It is expensive; it is not overpriced. You are paying for a Michelin kitchen, a hotel-grade service brigade, and a view that no other Italian restaurant in China can match.
Why It's Perfect for a Proposal
Proposing in Shanghai is a genuinely difficult problem — the city is enormous, the skyline is familiar to everyone who's watched a movie in the last fifteen years, and most of the obvious romantic addresses have become too busy to work. Sir Elly's solves it. The room is quiet. The window tables are spaced to offer genuine privacy. The service team have been trained to handle the moment with the kind of discretion that the Peninsula is famous for — you can brief the head waiter, you can hide a ring with the sommelier, you can time dessert to the exact moment the Pudong lights come on at 7pm. For more engagement-grade rooms, see our best proposal restaurants worldwide.
Why It's Perfect for Impressing Clients
The cultural signal is unambiguous. Taking a client to The Peninsula's Michelin-starred Italian is exactly the kind of choice senior Shanghai executives make for their own important dinners. The cooking is sophisticated enough to carry a serious conversation, the wine list covers every major Italian and French region with real depth, and the room is formal enough to frame the meal but not so stiff that it kills the evening. A terrace aperitif beforehand is the signature move.
Signature Dishes & What to Order
Start with the hand-cut beef tartare, which the kitchen dresses with aged Parmigiano and a single raw quail yolk. The house-made tagliolini with white Alba truffle in season is the single most photographed plate leaving the pass. Mains run to a reliably outstanding slow-braised veal cheek and a whole Mediterranean branzino that is deboned tableside. End with the warm chocolate soufflé — classic, faultless, precisely timed to the Pudong light show if you order at the right moment.