Ge Lang Guan

The whiteboard sets the station

The whiteboard changes with the day’s Shaoxing arrivals as Alexander Gaßlbauer, Executive Chef at Ge Lang Guan in Hangzhou, keeps the kitchen tied to a regional grammar rather than a chef’s signature. His training under Anton Schmaus and his later command as Kitchen Chef at Gasthaus Waltz in München gave him the useful parts of a European brigade education: repetition, timing, station discipline, and the authority to let a dish stay plain when plain is correct. At Ge Lang Guan, in Gongshu District, that discipline sits inside Shaoxing cooking, where aged wine, fermented vegetables, soy, and long heat do more of the speaking than garnish ever could.

Gaßlbauer also holds a Chef role at Gala in Madrid, but the Hangzhou kitchen asks for another kind of listening. Zhejiang and Spanish market cooking do not collapse into one method here. The work at Ge Lang Guan is to protect local character, not translate it out of itself. The restaurant holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand in the 2025 Hangzhou guide, and the recognition belongs to this house for its Shaoxing table: direct, seasonal, and built for shared plates moving steadily across the room.

Shaoxing wine in the sauce

The program turns on ingredients shipped from Shaoxing and written onto the board as they come into season. Free-range chicken sits in aged distillers’ grains until the flesh carries the winey perfume of the lees. Fish braises with Shaoxing wine, soy, and aromatics until the sauce turns glossy and savory. Eggplant is soy-poached rather than dressed up. The stinky tofu with fermented amaranth stems keeps its regional force intact, with fermentation doing the work that a softer kitchen might try to tame.

The format is à la carte, family style, and small-plate minded, which suits the food. One table can move from marinated chicken to braised fish, then to greens from the wok and a dish of eggplant, building the meal by contrast: wine fragrance, soy depth, fermented edge, vegetable snap. This is a kitchen of braises, marinades, poaching, and fermentation, not spectacle. The hand shows in restraint.

A mall room with its attention on the pass

The room sits inside My Babini Shopping Mall on Xiaohe Road, and the setting matters because it gives the cooking no borrowed romance. Contemporary, functional, and modest in its detail, the restaurant leaves the weight on the pass and the counter rhythm. Practical seating keeps the flow steady; the sound is lively, with tables ordering in clusters and plates landing for the center rather than for one diner alone.

That mall setting could have flattened the food into convenience. Ge Lang Guan resists that by making the board the point of return. The room changes because the cooking changes, and the cooking changes because the Shaoxing shipment changes. If the next service has a lesson, it will likely be written in chalk before it reaches the pass: aged distillers’ grains chicken, fermented amaranth stems, braised fish with Shaoxing wine.