Hangzhou: Dine at Local Home with English Speaking Hosts

Meet locals, eat authentic Hangzhou home cooking, and try dishes no restaurant serves. Market-fresh ingredients, an open kitchen, and English-speaking hosts to share about in-depth Chinese culture.
This is a home dinner, not a cooking class. You come, you sit, you eat, and you leave with a full stomach and a genuine connection to local life in Hangzhou.

Meet Danial & Helen — Your Hosts

Danial and Helen are both close to seventy, and they host for one reason: to make friends from around the world and swap stories and food across cultures.

Forty years ago they both worked at the Hangzhou Art Company. Later they ran a small antique shop of their own. The apartment you'll eat in still holds that life — landscape paintings, calligraphy couplets, an antique clock, blue-and-white porcelain. Most home dining hosts are people who cook. This is a couple who spent their lives around Chinese art, and who will also feed you extremely well.

Danial has been to around forty countries and spent twenty years in the timber trade in West Africa. Ask him about Benin. It is not a story you will hear at any other table in Hangzhou.

The Experience

This is a home dinner, not a cooking class — but their kitchen is open. If you want to join the cooking from start to finish, you're welcome.

Before your visit we'll confirm your dietary preferences and send step-by-step directions including phone number and WeChat. Two days before, you'll receive our Home Dining Cheat Sheets, a cultural primer on Chinese dining that answers the questions most foreign guests have before their first home dinner in China.

Note for Muslim guests: Danial and Helen regularly host Muslim friends. Tell them in advance and they will source the specific ingredients you require. Please note this is a home kitchen, not a certified halal kitchen.

Details

Xihu District, Hangzhou. Up to 8 guests. Mandarin, English, and a little French and German. Seven days a week, lunch and dinner.

Getting there: about 25 min from West Lake, 35 min from Hefang Street, 40 min from Hangzhou East Station. Nearest metro Fengtan Road (Line 2) or Gudang Xincun (Line 3).

Sample Menu

Hangzhou home cooking, seasonal and market-dependent.

1. Red braised pork (红烧肉)
2. Hangzhou tofu-skin rolls, vegetarian (杭州卷鸡)
3. Hangzhou Three Delicacies, with fish balls, chicken, egg and vegetables (杭三鲜)
4. Rice noodle seafood claypot (粉丝海鲜煲)
5. Eight-treasure diced, with peanut, dried tofu and vegetables (八宝酱丁)
6. Pian Er Chuan noodles, the famous Hangzhou specialty (片儿川)
7. Hand-wrapped wontons (现包馄饨)
8. Steamed sea bass (清蒸鲈鱼)
9. Sweet and sour pork ribs (糖醋排骨)
10., Braised bamboo shoots (油焖笋)
11. Stir-fried seasonal vegetables
12. Stir-fried seafood

Tell us in advance and we will cook for vegetarians, or source the specific ingredients you need. Note that 杭州卷鸡 translates as "rolled chicken" but is entirely vegetarian, made from tofu skin.

उपलब्धता की गारंटी के लिए जितनी जल्दी हो सके बुक करें। जल्दी बुकिंग पर विचार करना विशेष रूप से तब महत्वपूर्ण है जब आप सार्वजनिक छुट्टियों या सप्ताहांत जैसे उच्च सीजन के दौरान यात्रा की योजना बना रहे हों।

इस यात्रा को आप यात्रा शुरू होने से 24 घंटे पहले बिना किसी शुल्क के रद्द कर सकते हैं। यदि आप इसे 24 घंटे बाद रद्द करते हैं या यात्रा पर नहीं आते हैं, तो भी आपको गतिविधि की पूरी कीमत चुकानी होगी। पिक-अप या प्रस्थान में देर से आना यात्रा पर नहीं आने के रूप में माना जाएगा।