Spring Festival is in the air. The lunar New Year’s Eve dinner, the last yet most splendid meal of a year, pays respect to the past year and expresses hope for a happy future.

Traditionally, people dine at home but preparing that feast is time-consuming and labor-intensive. More locals have started to dine out during the past few years to avoid the busy and messy kitchen. Five-star hotel restaurants are their first options if quality food, caring service and fancy ambience are their priority. On New Year’s Eve, most tables in independent restaurants are double booked, which means earlier customers are pushed to finish their dinner quickly, leaving space for late customers.

Hotel chefs’ ways of building a connection between the food and New Year celebrations vary.

“Foods should be auspicious to express a good wish,” says Jacky Zhang, sous chef at Yi Long Court, The Peninsula Shanghai.

Chef Zhang focuses on presentation and names of the ingredients in the dish. For example, he serves poon choi (classic Cantonese New Year food with layers of braised seafood and vegetables served in a big bowl) for the coming festival. The round shape of the bowl represents completeness, perfection and gathering in Chinese culture.

Ingredients selected are better with names that are homophones for Chinese words meaning good things. His favorite lucky ingredients include haochi (蚝豉, a kind of dried oyster, pronounced the same as good news in Cantonese) and facai (发菜, a kind of algae, pronounced the same as making money).

Sam Gao, executive Chinese chef at Pudong Shangri-La, highlights the color in a dish.

“New Year food is better to be colorful and bright. I prefer shrimp and carrot, as red as fire, to make diners feel warm and touching. Egg dumpling (filled with minced pork) is also recommended. Its golden color and ingot shape is believed to bring fortune in the coming year,” Gao says.

Johnny Xiang, chef de cuisine at Hai Pai, Andaz Xintiandi Shanghai, believes there’s no festival food better than dessert, representing dolce vita, not to mention that locals generally have a sweet palate.

“I prefer preparing local desserts for New Year — for example eight-treasure rice (glutinous rice filled with red bean paste topped with eight different ingredients served in the shape of a bowl), jiuniang yuanzi (酒酿圆子, glutinous rice dumpling in fermented rice soup), sweetened rice cake and deep-fried spring roll filled with red bean paste,” says Xiang.

This week we explore some of the best Chinese New Year’s Eve set menus in the city’s five-star hotel restaurants, from those serving authentic Shanghai cuisine to those providing classical Cantonese festival flavors. Many have prepared special surprises for Chinese New Year’s guests, from free dishes to free wine

Colorful and bright

The Pudong Shangri-La, East Shanghai launches two different Lunar New Year set menus, each containing one appetizer, one soup, six to seven hot dishes, a dimsum plate and a fruit plate. Chef Sam Gao integrates most of his signature dishes into two menus. For example, his most popular curry prawn served with deep fried bun combines Singaporean flavor with northern China serving tradition. Prawn braised in curry sauce tastes juicy and slightly spicy, which is balanced by prawn’s natural sweetness. The golden color bun is crispy outside and fluffy inside. When serving, dip the bun with the curry sauce.

In addition, his menu is highlighted by duck skin stuffed with eight delicacies. Diners will be impressed by its presentation. All the ingredients such as abalone, sea cucumber, shrimp, bamboo shoot, mushroom, lotus seed and glutinous rice are stuffed in duck skin to make the skin look like a gourd. Such culinary technique makes each bite rich in texture and flavor. Chef’s signature dish seafood meat ball is also included. The ball is made from a mixture of minced pork and finely diced sea cucumber and scallop. The chef steams the ball in abalone juice for three hours before stewing it in soup with cabbage to make the flavor umami and rich. Clean and fresh cabbage well cuts through the fatness in ball.

The restaurant also prepares some special benefits for New Year customers, such as a lucky plate with golden orange, chocolate presented like gold ingot and nuts.

Golden fortune family set (3,888 yuan+15%) and prosperity and wealth set (12,880 yuan+15%) can both serve 10 people and need to be ordered 10 days in advance.

Venue: Gui Hua Lou, Pudong Shangri-La, East Shanghai

Tel: 6882-8888 ext. 6888

Address: 1/F, 33 Fucheng Rd

Jiangnan cuisine in 10 or 12 courses

Two menus, including ten courses and 12 courses, respectively, are specially designed by chef Charles Feng at Mandarin Oriental Pudong for Chinese New Year. Food style highlights Jiangnan cuisine (a general expression of various cuisine cultures popular south of the Yangtze River).

Three dishes in the set are recommended. Boiled lobster with sea urchin is a rich and deep soup with beautiful red and golden color. The natural sweet flavor of lobster meat and slightly sweet sea urchin go well with each other.

Shanghainese braised lamb with chili and leek in clay pot. The charm of the dish rests in the heat of the pot helping to release all the flavors of the ingredients, giving off more layers and length. The lamb is organic farmed so that its meat has a natural, concentrated aroma.

In the chef’s chicken congee, crab meat is double boiled with pureed chicken meat and fish maw. It has a rich and concentrated flavor and fine silky texture, suitable for older people suffering from indigestion or bad teeth.

Their “white rabbit” candy (a traditional Shanghai candy brand featuring an intense milky flavor) ice-cream and hawthorn mousse cake (present Chinese ingredients in classical Western way) give the whole meal a sweet ending.

Two menus are priced at 888 yuan+15% per person and 1,288 yuan +15% per person. Both are only applicable for four guests and above. The chef also prepares a surprise for each table — one of his signature dishes for free.

For tables with more than eight guests ordering New Year set menus, the restaurant gives a bottle of house wine as a gift.

Venue: Yong Yi Ting, Mandarin Oriental Pudong, Shanghai

Tel: 2082-9978

Address: LG/F, 111 Pudong Rd S.

Auspicious food for good wishes

The Peninsula Shanghai’s Chinese restaurant launches poon choi, lo hei (a kind of fish salad distinctively served in Lunar New Year) and glutinous rice cake flavored by coconut milk, paying respect to Southern China’s New Year festival tradition.

Fortune and fame is a premium version of poon choi, with around nine different ingredients, braised and then placed in a big round bowl by layers. Radish, bean curd sheet, taro and lotus roots are placed in the bottom. Pork and dried mushroom are put in the middle layer. The top layer gathers expensive ingredients including dried abalone, sea cucumber, conpoy and oyster.

When serving, the waiter spreads the sauce over the top layer, allowing it to flow down at the time diners start eating from the top. Be patient to eat this dish. The bottom layer is usually the most delicious, since ingredients absorb all the flavor from the sauce and become juicy.

The New Year tradition of serving poon choi can be traced to the late Song Dynasty (960-1279), when scholar general Wen Tianxiang (1236-1283), fearing a Mongolian invasion, fled to a village close to today’s Hong Kong to escape the barbarian invaders, who later founded the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). People in the village gathered all the foods they had and put them in a big basin to show respect to Wen’s patriotic belief.

Lo hei, also known as yusheng, is popular in southern China and Singapore. The hotel’s recipe features nine different ingredients highlighted by salmon, radish, carrot, seaweed and ginger, all shredded into long and thin slices, and seven seasonings such as ground peanut, sesame oil and plum sauce to create rich flavors and aromas. Lo hei means abundance of wealth and long life in Fujian dialect. People believe eating it can bring good luck and fortune.

Waiters in the restaurant will teach diners to serve this dish in the traditional way. All diners at the table stand up on cue, then toss the ingredients into the air with chopsticks at the same time, reciting wishes out loud. It is believed that the higher they toss the ingredients, the more fortune they will have.

Two kinds of poon chai are available: the premium set (2,188 yuan+15%, serving five people) and the general set (828 yuan+15%, serving five people). Both must be ordered three days in advance.

Lo hei (298 yuan+15%, serving six people) is available until March 5.

Venue: Yi Long Court, The Peninsula Shanghai

Tel: 2327-6742

Address: 2/F, 32 Zhongshan Rd E1

Diverse menu of 19 dishes, sweets

The Andaz Xintiandi’s set menu highlights local cuisine culture and variety, including 19 dishes. Chef Johnny Xiang tries to balance meat and seafood with vegetables to bring diners more health benefits.

Vegetarians may be interested in his stir-fry broccoli, sweet broad pea with seafood in XO sauce, featuring fresh taste and crunchy texture.

Meat lovers are urged to leave room for the chef’s signature dish — thousand sliced pork — which shows his fine cutting skills. About 5 meters of pork belly, with around 70 percent fat and 30 percent lean, is sliced 2 millimeters thin and wrapped around and around in the shape of a cone. It totals about 56 layers. Inside the cone are lily flower, agrocybeaegerita (a kind of mushroom) and dried cowpea. Each bite features a melt-in-the-mouth fatty taste, balanced by fresh and crispy vegetables.

Aromatic crispy duck is another highlight. The chef selects free-range farming dark fed with millet, which he says “has a distinctive fatty yet not greasy taste.” The chef marinates duck in his secret sauce made from chili, coarse salt and various herbs for 12 hours. Then the duck is steamed and deep-fried to create an outside crispy and inside tender texture. The duck is served with plum sauce and pepper salt.

The final dessert plate cannot be missed, including all the classical local festival desserts, from spring rolls filled with red bean paste to eight-treasures glutinous rice.

Two set menus are sold at 388 yuan+15% per person and 588 yuan+15% per person.

 

Venue: Hai Pai, Andaz Xintiandi, Shanghai

Tel: 2310-1700

Address: 88 Songshan Rd