This is the final installment of my listing of everywhere you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask, i.e., where to dine in classy buildings.

THE RUIJIN GUEST HOUSE, 118 Ruijin Er Lu, T: 6472-5222

Did you know that Shanghai has an architectural Three-Ms? Not the chocolate-centered kind but the three great estates which were connected to three great Shanghai names: Marshall, Moller, Morriss. The Marshall mansion we have already covered, the Moller mansion now houses the Communist Youth League (and they do not serve meals to strangers), so we now give you the Morriss estate.

H.E. Morriss was the owner of the largest English-language newspaper in the Far East, the North China Daily News, headquartered on the Bund (at No. 17, currently undergoing massive renovation). He had three sons and there are three grand houses on the estate (plus some of those ubiquitous Canadian pre-fabs which we do not wish to discuss). Morriss raced both horses and dogs, and he was well situated for the latter, as the "Canidrome" or greyhound track was located just behind his estate. (It still is, but is now the wholesale flower market.)

It is possible to get food in the old carriage house between the main house and the No. 3 or Art Deco (OK, maybe more Moderne) mansion to the rear. I would suggest, however, that you either book a banquet in one of the lovely rooms of the main house or else settle for coffee in its cafe on the back terrace.

If you book for a banquet you might even get some fabulous room choices, depending on your negotiating ability. For before-dinner drinks there is the small dark-paneled study (now a bar) with an inglenook (you know, a large fireplace set back in an alcove with benches on both sides) and a beamed ceiling -- the Morrisses were British you know. There was another small dining room next to it which had a walk-in vault for the family silver, but that room appears to have been turned into a bathroom (we weep).

This still leaves you the drawing room on the right, there behind the hallway fireplace, and the main dining room on the left, unfortunately fallen victim to extreme over-renovation. But how can you lose in such a lovely house? On the first landing of the curving staircase there is a pierced wrought iron curtain wall featuring two dogs (but not the racing kind). The wrought iron of the front door is so spectacular that we featured it in our first book, A LAST LOOK, along with the marble and bronze table in the hallway.

If the mansion were not marvelous enough, there are always the grounds, the portions not gobbled up by those cursed pre-fabs anyway. Chairman Mao and wife also stayed here at one point so of course you will want to look for the nifty above-ground bomb shelter under a grassy mound over beyond the meandering stream. There are trellises and lanterns and a Japanese bridge and a Moorish pavilion and about everything you would expect of an English millionaire's garden.

In fact this garden is so spacious and so lovely that almost any day you go there you will see white wedding gowns of the many brides being photographed in the many settings. And from any room in which you dine, and most especially from the terrace room where you take your coffee, you look out on this lush sylvan setting. The grounds used to be nearly one square block in size, that is until they built that Ruijin high-rise office building on the corner of it -- the workers' pre-fab barracks of which they somehow neglected to tear down when they finished. What can we say?

Although you cannot dine in them, the other houses are worth a look, one a faux-Gothic gabled number of brick and the other the aforementioned Deco-cum-Moderne. The latter has a dynamite black iron statue of a panther beside the curving staircase with its wrought-iron banister off the entrance hallway. The wrought-iron front door is another jewel (and also in our book).

Perhaps this house belonged to a son born in the Year of the Tiger, because the most spectacular sight in the whole works is in the dining room, a triptych of the tiger in the jungle. The son who commissioned that stained-glass beauty must not have seen the end coming, as it was crafted in the Jesuit-run workshop in Siccawei (now Xujiahui) and is dated 1949.

In fact, the story is that one son -- perhaps that same non-prescient one -- did not get out of China after 1949 and subsequently died in the gate house. Reportedly his possessions were then put on display by the Communist authorities as the loot of pirates and capitalists and exploiters and the like -- you get the idea. I thought that was the sad end of the story, or at least as I knew it, but then one day I got a letter from a member of a much younger generation of the Morriss family. They are happily living in England -- and still raising and racing horses. Apparently you can't kill the Good Life.

50 HANKOU LU, at 50 Hankou Lu (where else?), Tel: 6323-8383

Here you have a stately old bank building converted into a restaurant. It was the former home of a branch of the Bank of China, cohabiting with the Internal Revenue Administration (thus eliminating the middle man). What a wonderful opportunity to do a decor like the famous restaurant in London (called simply "Bank"), you know, dining in the vault, between the cashiers cages, in the managers and shroffs offices, right? Wrong.

They blew it. When we walked through the stately lobby, so far so good, into the dining room we were greeted by statues of totem poles and wooden donkeys and a bewildering display of non-related objects, including a neon silhouette of the Bund (the best thing in the place). But the building is still old and elegant, despite these depredations, and is still the restaurant closest to the Bund, when you have tired of the Peace Hotel, the Seagull (in the Seaman's Hostel) and the KFC.

And speaking of the latter, we promised you seven restaurants, which we delivered, but if you are generous enough to include Kentucky Fried Chicken as a restaurant -- and we admit that pushes the envelope -- we will give you an added bonus. KFC just happens to be located in the oldest and once the most exclusive club in Shanghai,

THE OLD SHANGHAI CLUB, No. 2 the Bund.

It doesn't get any better than this, architecture-wise I mean. Note the classical entryway with its marble staircase and banisters surmounted by wrought iron lanterns. Enter the high vaulted lobby with its interior colonnades topped by a frosted glass barrel ceiling. Note the brass door fixtures and the curving banister of the staircase with the dual cage elevators nestled in the middle. Ascend the marble stairs and view the ballroom, the grand dining hall, the billiard room, the library, faded but elegant one and all (and lovingly described in our fifth book, THE LAST COLONIES).

But if you dine, no, if you eat in KFC (one does not dine in a KFC) you are in the very room, and if on the left side then in the exact spot, where the famous Long Bar of the Shanghai Club once stood, with its taipans at the window end and its lowly griffins (the new boys) down at the dim end.

That you even enter that storied chamber is quite a coup. Previously the likes of you and me (and most especially me -- women were not admitted) would never have been allowed to set foot in the Shanghai Club. It was reserved exclusively for Business, and mostly for British Business at that. And now you sit there under the club's lofty coffered ceiling, currently painted red, white and blue (thank you, America) and munch on a chicken leg.

It does give you pause to reflect on the cycles of history, doesn't it?