Where To Celebrate The Lunar New Year In Auckland

Special hot pots, noodles and more to dive into the holiday, which falls on January 22 this year.

Millions of families from across Asia and here in New Zealand will be gathering this Saturday night for what they consider the most important meal of the year.

Saturday, January 21, is Chuxi — Chinese New Year’s Eve, and families will gather for tuan nian, the reunion dinner, to bid farewell to the Tiger and usher in the Year of the Rabbit.

For me, as a child growing up in Singapore, Mum would tell me there were two New Year’s to celebrate. There is the new year where there is a countdown and resolutions are made, and this other one — which Mum refers to as “the real New Year” where you need to do things right to get a year of good luck.

There’s a whole list of superstitions, rituals and taboos associated with Lunar New Year. Sweeping on New Year’s Day could mean sweeping away your wealth, using scissors or knives could cut away your luck and taking medicine could land you a year of ill health.

But among all the traditions, the most important part of the celebrations is the food.

For the reunion dinner, family members are expected to return home for the banquet in order to keep the solidarity and cohesiveness of the family unit.

If they can’t make it for whatever reason, then their presence would have to be represented by an empty seat.

It involves the flinging of raw fish slices, slivered carrots, crackers, and other ingredients from the dish into the air while shouting auspicious phrases in Chinese to ring in good luck for the year. It is believed that the higher the toss, the better the luck you will get.

Several restaurants across Auckland now offer this Singapore-Malaysian Lunar New Year dish during the festive season, including SkyCity’s Huami, Bunga Raya in New Lynn, Ipoh in Remuera and PappaRich.

The new Treasure Kitchen in Greenlane, located at the space once occupied by popular yum char restaurant Enjoy Inn, is a good place to get this unique Lunar New Year toss-up experience.

The restaurant’s head chef and owner Sam Ng hails from Johor Bahru in Malaysia, just across the causeway from Singapore, where lo hei is also a must-have at every Lunar New Year feast. His rendition of yu sheng at Treasure Kitchen comes with an option of either salmon sashimi or abalone, and is presented as part of a multi-course festive menu starting from $888 for a table of 10 to 12 people.

Also on Chef Ng’s speciality menu is another important Lunar New Year dish called pen cai. Legend has it that pen cai was started during the Song Dynasty (AD1132 — 1279) when villagers cooked this dish with whatever ingredients they had in a wooden bucket. The food was then served to a visiting emperor who was so impressed by the dish that he insisted his palace chefs cook it. The dish has evolved to symbolise abundance and to commemorate special occasions, the most important of which is Lunar New Year.

There are many renditions of pen cai, but the one at Treasure Kitchen is lined with layers of premium ingredients like abalone, king prawns, roast pork, shiitake mushrooms and sea cucumber.

In mainland China, where Chinese New Year is also called the Spring Festival, the weather is generally still pretty cold at this time of year. There, it is customary for many families to have dumplings and eat hot pot as a staple for the reunion dinner and through the festive season.

The pot’s round shape makes it a symbolic and popular choice for the new year because it represents “endlessness” and “reunion”, explains Guangzhou Hot Pot restaurant owner Harry Cai.

For the uninitiated, hot pot or steamboat as they are sometimes called, is a popular East Asian cooking method where the cooking is done at the dinner table. A boiling pot of soup stock is placed at the centre with a variety of raw seafood, meat, vegetables, noodles and dumplings.

Raw ingredients like prawns, meat, fish balls, vegetables and noodles are placed around a boiling stock pot and people take turns to add the ingredients into the pot. There are no rules or sequences to follow, just add the ingredients of your choice to the boiling pot of stock and enjoy them when they are cooked.

Typical hot pot ingredients include thinly sliced beef, pork, lamb, fish and meatballs and seasonal vegetables. But Cai says the ingredient orders go up a level during Chinese New Year. Popular orders include fresh abalone, scallops, oysters and live whole fish.

At Guangzhou Hot Pot, the signature scampi base set will set you off to a good start for a celebratory dinner. The set ($80) comes with a rich seafood broth, beef, pork, shrimp meatballs, clams, and a seafood selection.

Scampi and prawns are savoury symbols of good fortune and are said to bring happiness and laughter into the new year. Other ingredients from the restaurant’s live seafood tanks, like the fish, abalone and oysters — considered auspicious to eat — are sold at market prices.

Fish in Chinese sounds like “surplus” and represents abundance, while the Chinese word for oysters is hou, which means “wealth and good business” and eating them will bring good fortune for the year.

“Eating at New Year’s time is also when people catch up, some of whom have not met for a long time,” Cai says. “Hot pot is just ideal because people have an opportunity to talk and bond while waiting for the food to be cooked.”

But if a swanky place to impress the in-laws is what you’re after to celebrate the rabbit year, then look no further than Huami at SkyCity.

For this weekend only, executive chef Raymond Xue has created three exclusive festive set menus, ranging between eight and 12 courses and priced from $109 per person to $1398 for a table of 10 to 12 diners.

Xue says he draws inspiration from across China for his original-tasting dishes, and his culinary highlights include the auspicious Canton-style crayfish with butter and superior broth, Beijing-style whole fish and fruit wood-roasted peking duck.

Originally from Shanghai, Xue has worked in five-star hotels, fine-dining restaurants and luxury cruise ships. But he says his Chinese New Year menus have always been “designed and cooked from the heart”.

“Chinese New Year is the most important festival to me, but as a chef it is impossible for me to be with my own family for the reunion dinner,” says Xue. “So I treat customers at my restaurant as my extended family, and I put in my best effort in making sure they enjoy my New Year dishes.”

Traditional New Year dishes are chosen for their symbolism and connotations of luck, and there’s no exception in Xue’s selection.

Xue describes the crayfish as his “star dish” because the word for crayfish, or lobster, in Chinese is “the dragon of the sea”, and they are a symbol of strength and good fortune. “It is considered one of the luckiest dishes to have during Chinese New Year,” he says. Priced at about $280 per kg, one of these 2kg crustaceans would easily set you back upwards of $500.

Steven Loh, director of Malaysian chain PappaRich, doesn’t think a higher price tag for dishes means that the diner will receive more luck in return. Loh has added the prosperity yu sheng (from $68) and pen cai fortune pot ($238) dishes to the menu at PappaRich’s Auckland branches, priced lower than you’d expect to pay at restaurants.

“The belief is that the higher you toss, the more good fortune will follow. It’s not about how high you pay,” Loh jokes.

The chain’s aim, Loh says, is to make the Malaysian-style lo hei and New Year feasting style as accessible as possible to everyone. “I personally think people have not really experienced a true Chinese New Year meal if they haven’t done a lo hei,” Loh says.

For something away from tradition, Mr Hao restaurant is offering a modern take on Chinese New Year.

Since returning to New Zealand after spending more than 12 years in Asia, Mr Hao restaurant’s co-owner Paul Wong says he misses Shanghai’s Chinese New Year vibes. There, he says many of the younger Chinese no longer celebrate Chinese New Year the traditional way.

“They don’t travel miles to return home for a reunion or have multi-course banquets, but ring in the new year like Westerners do,” Wong says.

Many would celebrate over food and drinks with friends at Yong Kang Road, Shanghai’s popular bar and restaurant street, as Kiwis do at the waterfront over New Year’s.

Taking inspiration from “modern-day” Shanghainese New Year, Mr Hao’s Chinese New Year offering is a Lunar New Year seafood platter ($88) that includes abalone, crab, prawns, queen scallops, squid and a lobster tail, flavoured in the style of its famous signature spicy chicken wings.