Dinner in Hangzhou

We almost starved our first night in Hangzhou. It took longer than anticipated to settle into our hotel room, because they didn't really have a room for us. We settled for two single rooms with Nicholas and I sharing a single bed for the night. So by the time we decided to have dinner, it was about 8:30 pm. We went to the hotel restaurant but the staff was in full tilt cleaning mode, so we fled without asking for dinner (this was a mistake!).

We found a young female graduate student who was to be in charge of welcoming guests arriving on Saturday to the ICCM (International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians. She asked people at the hotel as well as her friends (via her mobile) and guided us by foot to some local restaurants. But they had all stopped serving. It appears that even if a restaurant is scheduled to be open until a certain hour, the staff will flee before closing time if at some point there are no customers.

I then asked if there were other parts of Hangzhou where restaurants stayed open later. I told our guide that I had seen some livelier areas on the ride from the airport. She said that there were hot pot places that stayed open late and suggested that we hail a taxi and ask the driver. We did that but the taxi driver was quite rude and said he did not know any place. We waved down a second taxi, and the driver was much more willing to help. So we jumped in. But we found ourselves driving past many restaurants that were obviously open and got worried that the taxi driver was taking us to an unnecessarily remote location. So, at Lauren's urging, I told the taxi driver that we didn't need to go to a hot pot place; we just wanted a good restaurant nearby. He said OK, there's one just ahead. He drove further, past more open restaurants, making us even more nervous. Finally he pulled over, pointed to one restaurant, and said, "if you head in this direction, all of the restaurants are good." Not wanting to take any chances, we just walked into the first one.

Inside, I immediately told the staff that I didn't speak Chinese very well but we wanted to eat. They said no problem and pointed to a counter with displays of their dishes. They explained that they served "guo cai", which means "pot dishes". In other words, a wok filled with soup or broth, meat, and vegetables. The display consisted of woks, each filled with the uncooked ingredients that would go into the soup. We couldn't decide between two of them, so they said they would just mix the two. We also ordered a stir-fried leafy green vegetable (qing cao cai xing) and some beer. Well, the taxi driver really did well by us. It was exactly what we wanted. We got this big wok full of broth with chopped up chicken pieces (bones and all), sliced beef wrapped around some kind of fungus or mushroom, and some kind of crunchy celery like vegetable. It was delicious but way too much for us. I suppose that if we had felt like staying longer and eating more leisurely, we might have been able to finish it. But we soon felt stuffed and exhausted, so we went back to the hotel and collapsed.