Well, let’s talk about food in this final post… After exiting Shaoxing Railway Station, there was no McDonald’s or KFC. Opposite the station is a commercial plaza called Marguerite. Judging by the signs, it used to house a Carrefour and Ajisen Ramen, but both have closed down, leaving only Lanzhou hand-pulled noodle shops and the like inside. There was also a Grandma’s Home restaurant nearby, so I ended up dining there…

Actually, if you’re dining alone at Grandma’s Home and really want to eat cheaply… you could just order a 3-yuan Mapo Tofu and a bowl of rice to fill yourself up… But since I was occupying a four-person sofa booth all by myself, I felt too embarrassed to order so little… Sweat… This particular Grandma’s Home had a nice ambiance and decent service, though the food was just average.

I successfully overate at lunch… Dinner was a set menu for two included with our stay at Dayu Kaiyuan… Dayu Kaiyuan features a lobby coffee bar, a Western restaurant named Jiu Coffee, a Chinese restaurant called Yujia Kitchen, a coffee shop inside Mr. Shop, tea houses including Yuhui Teahouse and Cheng Teahouse, as well as banquet venues Jishan Pavilion and Lan Garden…

The set menu for two was served at Jiu Coffee, but it was actually Chinese cuisine—specifically Shaoxing dishes. It consisted of four dishes and one soup. The chicken soup had so much chicken that, honestly, it wouldn’t have been considered a small portion even for two people… So I tried my best to stick to eating just the chicken and lotus root from the soup, along with a few pieces of stinky tofu. As for the other two dishes, I only took a single bite of each… Aside from the stir-fried seasonal vegetables, which were quite mediocre, the rest of the food tasted pretty good, and both the ambiance and service were excellent.

The next day’s buffet breakfast was also held here. The breakfast selection was extensive: bread, jam, Chinese dim sum, various congees, fried rice, noodles, shrimp cakes, chicken nuggets, french fries, corn… fruits, yogurt, salad, wontons, cereal, assorted beverages, several hot dishes, and even desserts… However, the taste was actually just average… Of course, the safest bet is to stick with items like bread, jam, bacon, congee, fruit, and yogurt—things that are virtually impossible to mess up…

After climbing a mountain, we returned to the hotel to check out for lunch and headed straight to Yujia Kitchen… This restaurant doesn’t have a physical menu; you place your order in a room at the back… But what you see in that room are actually just photos… Which suggests that maintaining this space is cheaper than printing menus…

We casually ordered two dishes and received complimentary fennel beans… The fennel beans were quite good, but the sweet and sour pork ribs were coated in batter and deep-fried. Although the exterior was crispy, they didn’t taste very good. As for the seafood youtiao (fried dough sticks), the dish was relatively light and tasted okay, but the youtiao itself was greasy, and there wasn’t much seafood in it either.

In the evening, we stayed within downtown Shaoxing. We had visited Lu Xun’s Hometown earlier in the afternoon, and after walking for a while, we stumbled upon a fairly bustling area. We found a highly-rated Cantonese-style café on Dianping called Congee King, so we stopped by for some casual dim sum… The shrimp dumplings were of exceptional quality, each containing three large prawns—absolutely delightful. However, the other two steamed dishes were rather strange; their internal temperature was excessively high, suggesting they might have been reheated in a microwave…

To sum it all up… Dining while traveling solo can be quite problematic… Unless you opt for fast-food chains like McDonald’s or KFC… ordering food always becomes a dilemma… Shaoxing cuisine is actually quite impressive. The city isn’t overly commercialized, nor is it crowded with tourists. It’s not a large city, yet its public transportation system is reasonably developed. Moreover, Shanghai Public Transportation Cards with numbers starting with ‘U’ or ‘C’ are accepted in Shaoxing. Shaoxing is a wonderful destination for a relaxing getaway… especially when you have a hotel like this one~~~~

Photos in this post taken with SONY NEX-5R + 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6 / 35mm f/1.8, post-processed in Lightroom.

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Jiangzhe Tours, Shaoxing Food, Shaoxing Tours