Sir Elly's

The Bund From the 13th Floor: What Sir Elly's Gets Right About Atmosphere and Wine

The view from the upper floors of The Peninsula Shanghai is one of the Bund's most reproduced sightlines, the sweep of the Huangpu River, the colonial facades of Zhongshan Road, the Pudong skyline across the water, and Sir Elly's occupies exactly that vantage point. The room itself is a 1920s art deco interior: coffered ceilings, warm brass, geometric detailing that references Shanghai's interwar era without tipping into pastiche. That combination of physical setting and architectural tone puts Sir Elly's in a specific peer tier among Shanghai's luxury hotel restaurants, where the room does as much editorial work as the kitchen.

Shanghai's fine-dining hotel circuit has consolidated around a handful of addresses where the dining room, the cellar, and the kitchen operate at broadly equivalent levels. Sir Elly's sits comfortably in that group. The building it occupies, The Peninsula Shanghai, a Five-Star property on the East Bund, carries its own address value, and the restaurant benefits from the infrastructure that comes with it: a serious cellar, a formal floor operation, and a general manager, Jisoo Chon, who brings hospitality-group discipline to the floor.

The Wine List as the Main Event

Within the Shanghai luxury restaurant scene, wine programs vary considerably. Some kitchens run serviceable lists that reflect the menu's geography; others build genuinely independent cellars that attract their own following. Sir Elly's belongs to the second category. The list runs to 420 selections and an inventory of approximately 4,010 bottles, with France, specifically Champagne and Bordeaux, as its primary axis.

A cellar of this depth at a hotel restaurant in China is not incidental. Building and maintaining a France-heavy list at 4,000-bottle scale in a market where import costs, storage logistics, and consumer patterns all complicate things signals a deliberate program, not an inherited one. The pricing sits at the higher end, the list is flagged at the $$$ tier, meaning many bottles exceed the $100 equivalent threshold, which aligns with what the Peninsula's operator, Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd. would expect from a flagship dining outlet.

For guests whose primary reason to visit is Champagne or mature Bordeaux rather than the food, Sir Elly's earns attention on those terms alone. The combination of selection depth, inventory scale, and French regional focus puts it among the more serious wine programs operating in a Shanghai dining room. Comparable depth at the same price tier is achievable, but rarely in a setting with equivalent Bund access.

Modern French-Asian Cooking: Where the Kitchen Sits in the City's Spectrum

The cuisine is listed as European Contemporary, with a French-Asian inflection under Chef Charles-Benoit Lacour. That positioning, European technique applied to ingredients or flavor logic drawn from the region, is a well-established format among Peninsula and Mandarin Oriental hotel kitchens across Asia. It plays to the strengths of international hotel clientele while maintaining enough regional reference to avoid feeling like a European restaurant that happens to be in China.

Among Shanghai's broader dining options, the French-Asian luxury format occupies a distinct position. It operates differently from the city's leading Chinese fine-dining rooms, addresses like 102 House (Cantonese) or the vegetarian precision of Fu He Hui (Vegetarian), and differently again from the ambitious modern European programs at places like Taian Table (Modern European, Innovative) or The Pine. Sir Elly's isn't competing with those kitchens directly; it operates in the category of refined hotel dining where the total package, room, view, service choreography, cellar, carries as much weight as the plate.

The Michelin Plate designation, held in both 2024 and 2025, confirms the kitchen clears a quality threshold without positioning it against the starred rooms in the city. On the Opinionated About Dining Asia ranking, the restaurant climbed from a general recommendation in 2023 to #369 in 2024 and #413 in 2025, movement that signals consistent quality rather than a single strong year. La Liste's 76.5-point score in 2025 adds a third independent reference point. Three concurrent recognition signals across different evaluation methodologies represent a coherent picture: a kitchen that performs reliably at a high standard.

Sir Elly's in the Wider Asia Fine-Dining Context

Hotel fine-dining at Peninsula properties operates within a recognizable format across Asia, making it useful to consider how Sir Elly's fits the regional tier. Luxury hotel restaurants in the French-influenced modern European mode appear at comparable addresses across the continent, from Chef Tam's Seasons in Macau to Imperial Treasure Fine Chinese Cuisine in Guangzhou and Dai Yuet Heen in Nanjing, though Sir Elly's European contemporary focus places it in a different culinary lane from most of those Chinese-cuisine addresses.

For a direct comparison to what European Contemporary cooking looks like at the highest levels in Asia, Zén, European Contemporary in Singapore sits at the extreme end of the format in terms of kitchen ambition and recognition. Sir Elly's is operating at a different point on that spectrum, but its combination of wine depth, formal setting, and multi-source recognition makes it a coherent choice within the genre. European settings in the same culinary category, such as Schwarzer Adler, European Contemporary in Hall in Tirol, offer useful reference for how the format plays outside Asia entirely.

The restaurant also sits in a city with its own distinct dining geography. For readers planning a broader Shanghai itinerary, our full Shanghai restaurants guide, Shanghai hotels guide, Shanghai bars guide, Shanghai wineries guide, and Shanghai experiences guide cover the full scope. Beyond Shanghai, comparable culinary scenes in the region are mapped across our guides for Xin Rong Ji (Xinyuan South Road) in Beijing, Ru Yuan in Hangzhou, Xin Rong Ji in Chengdu, and EHB within Shanghai itself.

Planning a Visit

Sir Elly's serves dinner and is located on the 13th floor of The Peninsula Shanghai at 32 Zhongshan Road East, Huangpu district. The price tier is ¥¥¥¥ for cuisine and $$$ for wine. Reservations through the hotel are the standard approach for this category of address.