Douglas Williams/Shanghai Daily news

In terms of something like a factory, a pharmaceuti-cal company or a ship building yard, forming a joint venture is clearly a good way to go in the People's Republic of China but there seems to be something odd about a joint venture pub.
Oscar's, on the corner of Fuxing Road M. and Baoqing Road, is one of these rare creatures with the eponymous Oscar's mum, Xiang Liming, and English gent Keith Isted being the joint venture partners.
And a joint partnership seems to be working well for this joint.
Oscar himself, 25, had long dreamed of having his own pub having spent four years at university in Plymouth, England, and subsequently developing a penchant for ale and whisky. A mutual friend introduced Xiang to Isted and the latter set about converting the former house into a pub. Now beginning its second year of trading, Oscar's draws from Isted's long and fruitful career in "F'n'B" (food and beverage) as the South Londoner affectionately refers to his chosen industry.
It's the industry with which he is intimately acquainted and one suspects it has provided him with bucket loads of heartache, headaches, belly laughs and valuable insights into human behavior in equal measure.
A chef in 1960s London and cooking in all the right bistros frequented by the beautiful people he gradually worked his way up the ladder. He described his situation in those days of mixing with the great and the good as "the tolerated oik" who came from an area of town, Crystal Palace, peopled more by the hoi polloi than the "la-de-da."
"Start-ups" became his specialty - working with restaurateurs to set up their establishments - and it was this work that brought him to Shanghai in the late 1990s. He came to start up the Face bar and restaurant complex, no less.
"My first task was to organize seven tree trunks that were to be used to support the marquee where the Indian restaurant was going to be. I was new in Shanghai and I thought it was going to be impossible but, as with many things here, it turned out to be much easier than I'd expected," Isted recalls.
Oscar Xiang uses his technical skills to spruce up the Website and the marketing.
"We have a last orders bell just like in a real English pub. The difference here is that we never use it," says Xiang. "I'm looking forward to the renovation planned for next month which should make the place feel even more like an old English pub."
The Shanghai Daily turned up unannounced on a Monday evening after Oscar's had experienced one of those weekends that are wont to befall those in the catering industry. "We were absolutely 'rammed' from Thursday till Sunday - we've been so very, very busy," Isted says. He has the look of one who has been through the eye of the storm and somehow miraculously and happily survived.
"Oscar's is probably more British in style than anything else," says the perpetually amused Isted, "I wanted a family, homely pub. We host the Shanghai Boat and Yacht Club as well as other clubs and we host the beer and pool league every Friday. We also have four darts teams. A lot of our customers are friends."
Family and homely Oscar's certainly is and it also has a good range of quality beers, a lovely beer garden and pub grub that's more like bistro grub. Location-wise, it's a short walk from not only lots of good restaurants but also the other main expat bars like O'Malley's, the British Bulldog, Sasha's, Zapata's and the Blarney Stone and that can only be a good thing. Judging from the number of punters dropping by en route to or from one of these hostelries, Oscar's is on a comfortable mini-tour.
"In business if you've got the ideal location, a first-class product, you spend millions on marketing, you provide really good customer care and you're really lucky, then you've perhaps got, at best, a 50-50 chance of success," says Isted.
One of Isted's interests is architecture and he finds no end of stimulation in Shanghai. He compares the housing revolution currently sweeping Shanghai to what happened in Britain after the war when huge areas of slum housing in many of the bigger cities were knocked down and people's living conditions improved very rapidly. However, he laments the rise of the car in Shanghai saying: "I find it ironic that just as most of the Western urban planners are realizing that buses and bicycles are the way forward, here in Shanghai, where for so long the bicycle has been king, bicycle lanes are being squeezed and more and more people are buying cars. It's a shame as cycling in Shanghai is so easy."
Voicing a sentiment shared by many Wester expats, Isted says one of the things he likes most about living in Shanghai is how safe he feels.
"Back in London it's open warfare; here, I don't worry. People seem very tolerant. If you go into the wrong bar in the wrong area of London you could quickly land yourself with a proper problem but here that situation doesn't seem to arise - not for Westerners anyway," Isted says.
The "easy-going, tolerant achiever" as Isted likes to think of himself, has a fondness for the expat community: "To live and operate in this city you need to be quite a tolerant person. Many of the people I know took perhaps six months to settle in but now they wouldn't dream of leaving."
To a small matter I raised a fortnight ago: by putting my e-mail address at the bottom of this article I had rather hoped to coax readers into contributing jokes, funnies, anecdotes, suggestions, criticisms and generally anything they felt might be worth sharing in a family newspaper. Thus far I have had but one such contribution and it was from a madman - well, an ice hockey player. Cheers Markus.
Perhaps we can widen the remit to say mentions of events that are sporting, musical or otherwise and even promotions will be considered depending on their humor quotient.
One other small matter, www.shanghaidaily.com has recently undergone an overhaul and is now slicker and easier to use bringing the news, local, international and business along with sport and features, including archives, live and direct to your computer. So, log on and register, it's very easy.
douglaswilliams@shanghaidaily.com