Dinner at Old Hangzhou 老杭州

My last night in Hangzhou and I will be off the next day for work, can’t say I’m looking forward to that. It has been a wonderful trip and I met quite a few people this time around. As I was walking around in Hangzhou Old Street, I realized that I wanted to treat myself to a nice dinner for once. I still have some cash from my budget, so having a nice dinner shouldn’t be that bad after all, most of my lunches and dinners have been at cheap eateries.

Hangzhou Old Street being a tourist destination, has a boatload of restaurants to choose from. The restaurant road is off to one side of the entire Old Street block. I wasn’t very familiar with Hangzhou cuisine but decided to settle for this place called Old Hangzhou 老杭州. It was still early in the evening so there were hardly any people eating at the place. They gave me a seat on the ground floor but there was heavy smoking from the next table and I couldn’t stand it. I asked to be moved to the second floor which isn’t used yet. The restaurant was a bit run down much like old Chinese restaurants tend to look like after a few years.

Since it was my last night in Hangzhou I decided to order a bit more. The menu showed some Hangzhou specialties and I ordered some of them. The Long Jing Xia Ren 龙井虾仁, is a shrimp dish which Hangzhou is famous for. I asked if there was a half order for this dish and they said yes. The dish was a bit expensive and I was afraid that I won’t be able to finish it. The Long Jing Xia Ren was delightful, the shrimp was nice an crunchy and and it was quite fragrant. I remember my boss berated me for not trying Long Jing Xia Ren during a visit to Shenzhen a few years back, no wonder he liked it so much.

The second dish was another Hangzhou speciality, this was called Dongpo Rou 东坡肉, named after Su Dongpo, the famous poet. Dongpo Rou is a small dish but it packs a lot of sinfulness in this tiny package. It is a large cube of pork belly boiled to a melt in your mouth kind of texture and then cooked in some dark sauce. It was wonderfully soft and tasty, for a while you could just forget the amount of cholesterol you are ingesting.

The last dish was Dry Fried Bean Curd Skin 干炸响铃. This was another Hangzhou speciality and I believed I had this in some other Chinese restaurants in Southeast Asia. The roll of bean curd skin is deep fried to crispy perfection and the feeling of biting into it is indescribable. I believe this was one of the best dinners I’ve had in China in a long, long while. All was well until it was payment time.

I was suprised to see that they charged me the full amount for the Long Jing Xia Ren when I specifically asked for a half portion. It told the waitress about this and call her manager who said that there is no such thing as a half portion. This pissed me off but I couldn’t really argue much in Chinese so I just sat there trying to figure out what to do. In the end, all that waiting amounted to nothing. There was nothing I could do anyway since this was their territory. I would just get back a them by writing about them. It was too bad though, the food was nice but ther services seems to be lacking a lot.

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