Since @Google_Gourmet is/ was in Hangzhou, I might as well write about my last, and best meal I had in Hangzhou, the provincial capital of Zhejiang, next to Shanghai. When a restaurant named themselves Definitely Fresh, they were not messing around with the freshness. Everything in the meal, from seafood to vegetable to meat, was top-notch fresh. And the cooking was also great. The result, one of the most memorable meal for me, on par with Yong Fu Xiao Xian in Shanghai. Definitely Fresh focuses on seafood from Yueqing Bay in Southern Zhejiang, between Wenzhou and Taizhou. In fact, they transport selected seafood from that area every single day. Cooked of course in the traditional Wenzhou and Taizhou style.
The chef started working as a chef at 16. He used to work in a top Taizhou restaurant famous in China. Then he went to start his own shop. Five years ago he started Definitely Fresh in Hangzhou. When he came, he found another chef to learn some Western cooking technique from. That’s why some of the dishes on the menu, like beef ribs, had its roots from the Western world. But of course since I came from the US, I was there to try the Chinese dishes unavailable back home.
The restaurant was located in a mall. We battled hour long traffic and finally arrived. Luckily they had a table for us during dinner time.
The menu was vast. And they also had a large selection of live and chilled seafood that you could pick.
Their 10 best dishes according to them were on the board behind the tank.
They also had some sample dishes in front of the kitchen for people to look at.
And some really top notch veggies:
We didn’t have many people so we could only order a limited number of dishes, but the dishes turned out fantastic. What we ordered:
Asparagus, mushroom, dried shrimp in stock. Very flavorful. Our local farmer’s market had the best asparagus vendor we had eaten in the States who used to supply some ** restaurants. This asparagus was right up there. Very tender.
The rice noodle, with a bunch of seafood and veggie. Great wok hei.
I don’t know why I didn’t take a photo of the fabulous deep sea yellow fish. That was what I had been craving to eat for a long, long time, and it finally brought back the memories of the flavor of the same fish that I ate years ago. Light, flaky, tender and perfectly steamed. To provide context, I passed on my beloved coral grouper to eat the yellow fish, and it was every bit as good. No fishiness like the farmed ones were.
This soup didn’t look like much, but what a spectacular soup it was. Its an old duck soup with dendrobium orchid, swallow, along with some chinese herbs that I didn’t know. It was one of the trip’s highlight. In fact, I would rank this as one of the best soup I had had. We gladly drank them all.
I don’t know exactly what kind of shellfish it was. It was raw, very fresh, on a vinegary marinade. Nobody else ate raw in my party so I polished off the whole plate.
Also ordered and not pictured, beef tendon appetizer. Tender and flavorful.
Pea shoots as veggie of the night.
Whole meal for five people was 899 RMB- about 128 USD.
If I ever come back to Hangzhou, this will be a repeat for sure. This is the kind of top notch Chinese cooking that we just don’t have in the US.
Definitely Fresh 铁定鲜乐清湾小海鲜
杭州市西湖区西溪路588号美帆广场2层
2F, Meifan Plaza Proya, 588 Xixi Road, Xihu, Hangzhou, China Mainland
