Hangzhou Hotel Keeps Its Michelin Star

Jin Sha, the Chinese restaurant inside Four Seasons Hotel Hangzhou at West Lake, still holds one Michelin star in the 2025 Michelin Guide Hangzhou. (guide.michelin.com) The Michelin Guide lists Jin Sha as a one-star restaurant at 5 Lingyin Road in Hangzhou’s Xihu district and describes its food as “Zhejiang neo-classics with a modern twist.” Michelin’s inspectors say the kitchen sources seasonal ingredients from across China. (guide.michelin.com) That keeps Jin Sha in the city’s starred tier after Hangzhou’s first Michelin Guide launched on May 30, 2023, when Michelin awarded six local restaurants one star. Michelin said its inspectors were struck then by Hangzhou chefs’ “seasonal approach” to curating dishes. (michelin.com) In the second Hangzhou edition, released on April 29, 2024, Four Seasons said Jin Sha had retained its star for a second consecutive year. The hotel said Senior Executive Chinese Chef Joe Wang’s team built menus around seasonal ingredients and changing techniques rather than a single regional boundary. (press.fourseasons.com) By May 8, 2025, Michelin had expanded the Hangzhou guide to 77 restaurants, up 15% from the prior year, with 1 two-star restaurant and 12 one-star restaurants. Michelin said the third edition showed “significant investments, diverse concepts, and consistently high standards” across the city. (michelin.com) Jin Sha’s place in that field matters because Michelin is no longer treating Hangzhou as a one-off destination guide. In three editions, the city moved from 51 recommended restaurants in 2023 to 77 in 2025, while Michelin added Hangzhou’s first two-star restaurant and first Green Star in 2025. (michelin.com 1) (michelin.com 2) For Four Seasons, Jin Sha is also a hotel restaurant competing as a destination dining room, not just an amenity for overnight guests. The company says the restaurant serves Jiangsu-Zhejiang cuisine under chef Wang Yong, uses local and seasonal ingredients, and has held three diamonds in the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide from 2018 through 2025. (fourseasons.com) Michelin’s own write-up points to the details inspectors are rewarding: braised pork belly, crabmeat and roe xiao long bao, and a dining room set among ponds and manicured gardens by West Lake. The guide still categorizes Jin Sha at the one-star level, which Michelin defines as “high quality cooking.” (guide.michelin.com) So the story is less about a surprise promotion than about durability. In a Hangzhou dining market that Michelin says is growing quickly, Jin Sha has stayed on the starred list by keeping the same pitch year after year: seasonal sourcing, Zhejiang-rooted cooking, and luxury-hotel consistency. (guide.michelin.com) (michelin.com)