DUAN Yu, 20, from the freezing north of China, meets his southern-born fiance Hua Fengfeng (an arranged marriage) at the West Lake in Hangzhou. He is first charmed by her looks, but they soon quarrel over food - for which Hangzhou is famous.

Hua insists one needn't know how to cook to be a connoisseur. She goes out and returns with seven delectable dishes and snacks that only a gourmand would know. She presents, in order:

Stir-fried shrimp in the shell from Tai He Lou (literally Peace Restaurant);

Meat bun from You Yi Cun (Another Village Restaurant);

Noodles with fried pork from Kui Yuan Guan (Best of Best Restaurant);

Sauteed Pork from Wang Run Xing (Royal Dishes Restaurant);

Fish balls from De Yue Lou (Dear Moon Restaurant);

Sweet lotus root from peasants near the West Lake;

Fried chicken from vendors in Taipingfang Lane;

Well-mannered Duan, first time in Hangzhou, recognizes every single legendary dish. He almost loses his composure in his desire to dive into to the aromatic and delicious food.

This tale, set in ancient times, comes from one of my favorite martial arts novels - "The Seven Weapons Series" - by Taiwanese writer Gu Long (1937-1985).

Born Xiong Yaohua, Gu Long (literally "Ancient Dragon") was one of the famed trio of writers in China's martial arts novel scene, along with Louis Cha (pen name Jin Yong) and Leung Yu-seng in the 1960s. Each staked out their own territory in martial arts and they are unrivaled today.

Food is essential in Gu Long's books, and many heroes are both martial arts masters and connoisseurs of both the most elegant and the simplest dishes.

"The Seven Weapons" was the first martial arts fiction I read 12 years ago, at 13 in Shanghai. I dreamed of having my own taste in Kui Yuan Guan as I kept reading the name in Gu Long's other novels.

In one tale, a revered martial arts master rides for an hour to eat breakfast at Kui Yuan Guan at 6am on the day of his showdown battle. Today a meal like that ancient breakfast would cost around 100 yuan (US$15).

To me at that age, tasting noodles in that restaurant would be like becoming a martial arts hero.

On my 14th birthday in 1998, two weeks before finals, I suddenly decided to skip class. I went alone to Hangzhou on a mission to track down the locations of all the seven legendary shops that prepared those seven dishes - even if my dad once told me they were no longer standing.

My fear of getting lost started at the Hangzhou train station, as I got into a taxi. But the trip took 15 minutes. There were no customers. It was 9:30am on a weekday, too late for breakfast and too early for lunch.

I was enchanted by how old the restaurant looked, exactly as I had imagined it. So I dared to order, despite the strange glances from waitresses. I finally got my long-desired noodles with shrimp and shredded eel for 18 yuan, not cheap for a noodle dish at that time.

The taste was unforgettable.

I also found out that Gu Long, the Taiwanese writer so fond of all these dishes, had never set foot in Hangzhou. He only imagined the dishes, based on his research.

Dear Moon Restaurant, which he mentions, is a famous attraction in Suzhou rather than Hangzhou. Another Village and Apricot Village are names from ancient Chinese poems. Royal Dishes Restaurant is still in Hangzhou, but not famous for sauteed pork. Vendors and peasants who made fish balls and sweet lotus root are impossible to track down.

The noodles at Kui Yuan Guan were the only dish I could trace, which made the noodles even more precious to me. For a long time, Kui Yuan Guan was the whole of Hangzhou for me.

Long before writer Gu Long was born, Kui Yuan Guan was already known as the "King of Noodles in Southern China."

In ancient China, Hangzhou was also called Wulin: wu means martial arts and lin means forest. Wulin was the world of martial arts heroes and villains.

The restaurant has been in the same spot for nearly 140 years, since it was founded by a businessman from Anhui Province in 1867. There are a lot of stories about it.

Poor students loved the cheap noodles and the kind owner who always gave them extra snacks.

Shortly after he opened the shop in 1867, the first owner put three cooked eggs in the bowl beneath the noodles to nourish a poor young student. He was on his way from Hangzhou to Beijing to take the extremely competitive Imperial Examination (known as Keju).

Eggs were considered highly nutritious and brain food; three eggs stood for the three rounds of tests in the Imperial Examination.

A few months later, the poor student came back. He had passed all the exams and become a government official. To thank the owner, he named the place Kui Yuan Guan - kui means best, yuan is the title for those passing the exam and guan means a small restaurant. The phrase means the best of all the best candidates in the imperial exam. The tale became a legend.

Intriguingly, many students today avoid eggs before important exams since the shape looks like the number zero and represents a bad luck, getting a bad grade, a zero.

Owners have changed over the years, and one of them came up with the recipe for noodles with shrimp and eel.

Gu Long, living in Taiwan, couldn't visit but he must have heard such rave reviews that he kept writing the restaurant and the dish into his novels.

Hangzhou dishes have always been famous for their taste, distinctive from that of nearby areas.

Noodles are a northern Chinese favorite while people in the south prefer rice. But the scenic water town of Hangzhou has been famous for its noodles for at least 200 years. That's probably because the royal families of the Southern Song Dynasty made it the capital after they retreated from the north in 1127.

For the same reason, Hangzhou dialect is also quite different from that in nearby areas. It adds an extra er to the end of sentences, common in northern Chinese dialects and rare in the south.

Over the years, noodles have become a symbol of Hangzhou dishes. The noodle is the flat northern style while the noodle soup is richer with seafood and vegetables like bamboo, difficult to get in the north.

But the real local favorite in Kui Yuan Guan and elsewhere in Hangzhou is simple Pian'er Chuan noodles for only 3-7 yuan, available from five-star hotels to secretly hidden lanes. Pian'er means thin slices of meat and chuan is the cooking method - putting food briefly in boiling water and removing it.

Denizens of Hangzhou associate the famous dish with the words of famed poet/official Su Dongpo from the Song Dynasty. He said, "We are too skinny without meat and too coarse without bamboo (symbol of refinement)," which inspired the dish. It is cooked with fresh pork leg, bamboo and preserved vegetables.

Among all the old shops in Hangzhou, Kui Yuan Guan is one of the least changed. The famous venue only has one new branch, opened in 2003.

Many people and tourists, however, are disappointed as the legendary noodles served in the mobbed restaurant cannot live up to their exalted reputation. The venue is old-fashioned and waiters rush about, serving more than 4,000 customers a day in the three-story eatery.

The shredded, quick-fried eel and shrimp noodles actually should take a long time to prepare as the original recipe requires the ingredients to be stir-fried three times with three different kinds of oil. But they are quickly made, considering the flow of so many customers a day.

Restaurant staff insist they have maintained the original taste and cooking methods.

Decide for yourself.