After a week of hard work, I spent this weekend with some familiar friends and new friends, exploring old and new places of Hangzhou. Once again, as it often is in this country, the focal point centers around our food adventures.

I'll start with some of today's little finds. My boyfriend had seen a cafe in MoreHangzhou magazine that boasted fresh roasted coffees. Knowing how I am, I just couldn't resist the thought. So today we set out to search for this little unknown cafe, along the way, we discovered quite a few other little gems.

This little cafe is called "The Best Coffee in Town 几光咖啡". We took a cab and landed off the main road. We had called this cafe in advance to confirm Free Wi-Fi and lunch, but they didn't serve food so we searched around in that area for a quite meal before heading to the cafe... 

Nearby was a shopping mall called "In Time". Yep, it was the same as the big one in downtown, only this one is in uptown. Not seeing anything else very tempting, I dragged my boyfriend to the food court of this mall. Everytime I enter one of these Chinese mall food courts, I am always impressed by how yummy the foods are compared to American food courts.

We scanned around and saw a lot of yummies, but was drawn to a very intruiging little restaurant we had never heard of. This little restaurant is called "Babela's Kitchen".

Babela's Kitchen served mostly western style food, fried chicken wings, pasta, salads, a nice variety of drinks, desserts (mango pudding was heavenly), and more. The other plus of this restaurant was its "non-smoking" environment, a GodSend for a Californian in China.

Our meal came timely and very pleasing to look at. The appetizers were very good, especially the 8 RMB Chicken Wings. The only little mishap was that I ordered a Honey Pomelo Ice Tea, but they gave me a Coke + Vanilla Ice Cream Float instead. After I told the waitress, we discovered the English part of their bilingual menu had a mistake and listed Honey Pomelo twice, once for the correct drink and once for the float. They were pretty nice about it, so I didn't request them to fix it and just kept the float instead. After our meal, a waiter came by and asked us to fill out a survey on our satisfaction for a complimentary Mango Pudding. I was very pleased with the restaurant and filled out the form, noting the English misprint and that's when I tasted their heavenly Mango Pudding. We had a decent meal for 2 for about 60some RMB, in a nice environment with nice service. This is a little joint, I'd recommend to others in the area, perhaps those looking for a lunch before dropping by to this nice little cafe from where I am writing this entry.

After our meal, we shopped around this mall and found some very nice little shops that the downtown In Time didn't have, with reasonable prices.

I also found some really adorable stuffed animals for friends and myself. See photos. This is one of the little mini stuffed animals we got. It reminds me of Little Red Riding Hood's wolf. It's a little wolf in a sheep's coat with hoodie. This is from the German company Nici (I think) and their story is the wolf just wants to play with little sheep so that's why he made a little sheep looking coat, it's not because he wants to eat them. :p

My boyfriend picked up a pair of sports shoes for badminton. They sports shoes shop LiNing, gave us a voucher for the food court and so we went back and picked up some Peanut Butter pancakes at "CoCo Curry". Yum! See photo below.

CoCo Curry food stand inside uptown In Time shopping Mall food court area with peanut hand make pancakes

This little cafe is very cozy on the inside, with enough seats for maybe 15-20 tops, with tables + chairs and sofas + coffee table setup. I ordered a Cordota or something (I have a bad memory), and it was nice milky, smooth cup a' joe. The music here is mellowy soft with Free Wi-Fi. The service here is very friendly with a light decor. Hanging lights, young couples painted on walls, some books for you to pick up and read, and a nice selection of Italian & domestic coffees, nearly all of which are roasted in house. Upon entering the cafe, you can smell the scent of coffee lingering in the air. Though this shop does sell ash trays, luckily none of the guests were smoking and I didn't see any ashtrays sitting on the coffee tables.

The only thing is the coffee is about 35some RMB per cup, so might be a bit pricey for regular coffee drinkers.

We bought a bag of coffee before we left and I was impressed with how knowledgeable about coffee the servers were. After this I've got to head home, clean up and get ready for my friend to visit me from California. :) Can't wait!

Directory Links to the places mentioned: 

- The Best Coffee in Town
- Babela's Kitchen

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