We ate at a well-known restaurant 天外天 (Tian Wai Tian) located outside the Lingyin Temple. It's been around forever and is one of the three notable restaurants in the West Lake area for Hangzhou food. According to Hou Xiaoting, it used to be a small simple, vegetarian restaurant (one of those restaurants that only uses vegetarian ingredients but imitates typical meat dishes) right at the entrance to the temple that was just known for its good food. Today it's a much bigger, fancier affair - with a big building and real meat dishes. After inquiring about it with the waitress, it turns out that the old restaurant which Hou Xiaoting (who is a vegetarian) fondly remembers wasn't making any money just as a vegetarian restaurant so it sold the business to someone else who replaced the vegetables with profit-making meat dishes. I guess real meat is where the money is in China (especially with the rising pork prices).
Luckily, they still had a few good vegetarian choices and we tried a great 茶树菇炒南瓜 (tea tree mushrooms stir fried with pumpkin) and an imitation meat dish (it was a mushroom based dish that was meant to look and tasted like a stir fried eel dish).
Imitation Eel Dish
Tea Tree Mushroom and Pumpkin (forgot to take a photo until we'd eaten most of it so this may not do the actual dish justice)
Owen and I also had to sample our first 东坡肉 (Dongpo Pork) since it's probably the first dish people mention when you ask about "Hangzhou or West Lake Food". We knew that you order it by the piece, but we were a bit surprised when this tiny piece of meat in a bowl the size of a Japanese tea cup showed up at the table. Regardless, the very fatty meat was tender and not greasy (the fatty part is supposedly really good for your skin) and once we found a knife to actually cut it up (chopsticks were not going to be able to do this job), it was quite tasty.
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