MAKAN Restaurant

Founded in 2014 near Xujiahui Metro Station, MAKAN has built its reputation over more than a decade in a city where Middle Eastern restaurants tend to open and close within a few years. The restaurant occupies the second floor of a Caoxi North Road building in Xuhui District, dressed in an Arabian-style interior with private dining rooms, and reviewers describe belly-dance performances as part of the evening atmosphere on busier nights.

The kitchen works through Lebanese and Syrian cooking with a head chef who spent more than twenty years working in Dubai before joining MAKAN. Soups form an early highlight, including lentil, harira, and seafood versions, while the mezze spread runs through fattoush, tabbouleh, hummus, baba ganoush, and mutabbal. Rice dishes carry more weight later in the meal: kabsa, biryani, sayadieh, and bukhari all appear on the menu, alongside grilled lamb chops and Aleppo-style kebabs finished over open flame. Dubai-style coffee closes out the meal for diners who want something beyond the restaurant's dessert offerings.

The restaurant cites fifteen culinary awards accumulated since opening, a detail corroborated by Shanghai's own municipal tourism office, which features MAKAN in its official dining guide to the city's Middle Eastern restaurants. A shisha lounge operates alongside the main dining room, giving the restaurant a slower, more social register for diners who want to extend the evening after the meal itself is finished.

Xuhui's stretch of Caoxi North Road sits within easy reach of Xujiahui's shopping and office towers, giving MAKAN a mixed clientele of local diners, expatriates, and visitors drawn by its longevity in a competitive restaurant scene. That endurance, more than a decade in the same neighbourhood while newer entrants have come and gone, has become part of how regulars describe the restaurant when recommending it to others.

The restaurant's own materials describe its kitchen as fully halal, though this rests on the restaurant's self-description rather than a named third-party certifying body, consistent with the absence of any single unified halal certification authority operating across mainland China.