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December 19, 2013

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Here’s how to sample authentic Hangzhou cuisine

By Xu Wenwen | December 19, 2013, Thursday | Print Edition

Chinese cuisine is divided into eight great culinary traditions and Hangzhou gastronomy is a branch of Zhejiang cuisine, one of the eight.

Hangzhou cuisine is mild, delicate and emphasizes fresh flavors by using freshwater ingredients. It frequently features meats and vegetables cooked together. Peppers and scallions are seldom seen. Customary cooking methods include boiling, steaming and sautéing.

In Hangzhou, locals now enjoy a variety of food, traditional or Western, due in part to the introduction of more Western foods.

The change is apparent on menus of new Hangzhou restaurants, which also serve spicy, fried, grilled and fusion fare. Less than half of the menu items are traditional Hangzhou food.

Aside from Lou Wai Lou and Zhi Wei Guan, two century-old Hangzhou cuisine restaurants, tourists find it sometimes difficult to get local cuisine. Today Shanghai Daily introduces two new restaurants that will fill the gap: Hangzhou Restaurant and Hangzhou Cuisine Museum Restaurant are as authentic as they sound.

Hangzhou Restaurant

An old restaurant established in 1921 and one of the most popular restaurants in the city, Hangzhou Restaurant closed in 2004 due to subway construction.

Three months ago, the new Hangzhou Restaurant opened in the city, with a very different look than the plain decoration of the old one: An archway façade is built of red brick, and the inside is built of gray bricks that were “recovered from a house built in 1939 that was torn down,” says the manager, Liu Guoming. Huge parasols cover tables, with light provided by paper lamps.

There are pottery containers for rice wine, old bicycles and melted candles to create a vintage atmosphere.

The menu features 12 kinds of Hangzhou dishes, including the most famous, the most grassroots and the most traditional.

One of the most famous is jiao hua ji or beggar’s chicken, wrapped in lotus leaves and soil and roasted. The story goes that a beggar steals a chicken, wraps it in leaves and buries it. At night, he digs it out and puts it on a fire to roast. It turns out to be very delicious, even better than chicken cooked normally with seasonings.

The restaurant adapts the traditional recipe by placing the chicken in an iron bowl wrapped with lotus leaves inside and covered with soil outside. The sealed iron bowl is to keep all the seasonings, juices and aroma within, while fruit tree wood is used for grilling because it produces less smoke and smells pleasant. The soil becomes a crust after grilling, and customers are encouraged to crack the crust.

Another food using material from trees is buns steamed on pine needles. In a bamboo steamer, Hangzhou-style small buns filled with minced meat and gravy are placed on pine needles collected from high mountains. The aroma is pleasing.

The menu also lists the most traditional Hangzhou dishes, “all taken from a recipe book of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) by gourmet Yuan Mei,” says Liu. The series includes eight dishes, and the menu says how they’re cooked:

• Feng xiao (rice powder pancake) — Knead glutinous rice powder into slices, fry in oil, add powdered sugar;

• Shi lang tofu — Fry tofu slices, add a glass of wine, some shrimp, some shallots and simmer until soft;

• Lift bed sheet — Boil pig’s feet, repeatedly pour hot oil onto the skin until it wrinkles, simmer with soy sauce. When served, its top skin can be lifted, as if lifting a bed sheet.

Address: 205 Yan’an Rd

Tel: (0571) 8708-7123

Cost: 50 yuan per person

Hangzhou Cuisine Museum Restaurant

One of the country’s biggest cuisine museums, China Hangzhou Cuisine Museum specializes in the culture and history of the local cuisine.

All 400 dishes it exhibits in gel replicas are available on the menu of its attached restaurant. While touring the museum, take a menu to note what you want to eat later.

Groups can order specialized banquets, such as foods from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) or Republic of China (1912-1949). The former is more “academic” and ideal for “experts to study history,” while the latter “fits modern people’s tastes better” and is “very cultural,” says Yang Qing, general manager of the museum.

He says the museum spent years exploring the diets of a dozen well-known figures who lived in Hangzhou during the Republic of China, allowing it to design the republic banquet, with each dish commemorating one scholar.

Bamboo in snow is made to commemorate scholar Liang Shiqiu, a renowned educator, writer, translator and literary theorist, who once wrote that “chewing bamboo shoots delights the teeth and cheek the best, and no other food can compete.”

Raw, unpeeled bamboo shoots are buried in heated salt, with fresh bamboo leaves decorating the dish, which looks like snow covering a bamboo grove.

The bamboo shoots are cut so that the inside is baked and flavored by the hot salt. There are no other seasonings, so the flavor is only fresh bamboo. Customers peel the bamboo by hand to get to the crunchy meat inside.

Braised pork in soy sauce commemorates Wang Guowei, a famed writer and poet. Wang’s daughter once said, “my father likes braised pork in soy sauce, but he eats only the one cooked by my mother.” Unable to get Wang’s wife’s recipe, the museum found out that she was from Haining, Zhejiang Province. So staff members interviewed several over-80 women in Haining and discovered the authentic Haining-style recipe, which uses less sugar but more preserved vegetables.

Address: 9 Fenghuangshan Rd

Tel: (0571) 8792-1117 (call one day in advance to book banquet)

Cost: 50 yuan per person; 200 yuan per person (for banquet)

 

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