Last Call: Keven Café, the French Concession’s Diner

Last call at Keven Café, the western restaurant that became the French Concession’s beloved neighborhood diner. The café, which closes today, sat unassumingly on leafy Hengshan Road for 25 years, a comfortingly enduring presence amidst the meteoric transformations of the last quarter-century.

Keven Café, in the former Cavendish Court Apartments

When it opened, in October 1997, Keven Cafe was the only place outside a hotel to get a western breakfast or a cup of coffee. Like any good diner, the food was good, but never fancy, the waitresses were efficient, extremely competent, and a tad brusque, and the surroundings, unremarkable. And the most remarkable thing: very little changed.

Like a grandmother’s living room, the interior never changed, never felt the need to subject itself to the ‘refreshment’ that restaurants of a certain age feel they must do to keep up. Keven remained stubbornly the same: the same Tiffany-style lamps, generic landscape paintings, coffee shop tables and chairs, the same layout.

The menu didn’t change much, either. The chef came from the Jing’an Hilton, which had opened a decade earlier, and his menu was a classic of 1980s Shanghai hotel coffee shops. Club sandwiches, nasi goreng, spaghetti bolognaise, fish & chips, cream of mushroom soup. All very, very good.

For breakfast, there were pancakes, eggs any style, the famous “fluffly” omelet—the extra ‘l’ remained on the menu through several menu changes—and some of the best waffles in town. In the early days, when Hengshan Road was a raucous bar street, late nights out ended with a Keven Café breakfast, and its signature no-nonsense coffee.

That coffee was important to the first generation of Shanghai Daily ‘foreign experts’ who arrived in 1999 and lived in the Kai-wen serviced apartments above the café, in the onetime Cavendish Court Apartments. The luxury Art Deco apartments—just two per floor—were constructed by builder Alexander Reyer for Victor Sassoon’s Cathay Land company in 1933. When the building was converted into serviced apartments in the 1990s, the old boiler room became the Keven Café.

Keven Café heralded a new generation of western dining in Shanghai. The previous generation of haipai xican, places like Deda, featured western dishes from Old Shanghai that had become part of Shanghai cuisine–borscht, schnitzel, palmiers, and usually had a link to pre-1949 Shanghai. Keven served the western food that was in vogue when the city reopened in the 1980s, available in what were then the fanciest restaurants in town—international hotel coffee shops. What was once new has become nostalgia.

In its final days, the café was crowded with old patrons, coming for a last cup of coffee, a final slice of cheesecake, a last look around at this unchanging place, where change has finally come. Keven Café, we’ll miss you, and this corner of 1980s Shanghai.