Spring festival food Part 5

We have come to the end of a five-part series of a culinary adventure to the different hotels and restaurants that participated in the celebration of the Chinese New Year. Your favorite food columnist received seven invitations but could attend only five and today, the report will feature the festivities at the Radisson Blu Hotel Cebu (beside SM City Cebu, North Reclamation area, phone +63 32 4029900).

Faithful to the observance of Chinese culture to welcome the New Year, Radisson Blu began with the Hoi Gong ceremony or dotting the eye of the Chinese lion with the participation of Radisson Blu Hotel Cebu GM Lyle Lewis and Cebu City Councilor Margot Osmeña. The regular fun fare of the dragon dance and lots of noise followed to make sure that an atmosphere of prosperity and abundance will be ushered in during the Year of the Dragon.

Yee Shang Tossing Ceremony has become institutionalized as an activity for the celebration and definitely, this time, I arrived on time to participate in tossing the ingredients and made sure that the toss was higher with better handling of the chopsticks.

A feast on Chinese cuisine followed and faithful to tradition, the dishes served were symbols of prosperity. Chefs and staff of Radisson Blu Hotel were extra careful in labelling the dishes to highlight this representation of good fortune.

Take a view of the appetizers like the Golden Marinated Pork, Shredded Fortune Chicken with Jellyfish and Healthy Cold Shredded Beef. Even the humble chicken feet dish was renamed as Prosperity Marinated Phoenix Feet. In China, the phoenix is a symbol of virtue, grace, luck and happiness.

And the soup, Eight Treasure was carefully selected because it contained ingredients that signify prosperity. Usually, the soup contains rare and expensive ingredients like dried scallop, abalone and shark fins but the latter ingredient is the center of much controversy. The shark population has been drastically reduced causing a disruption in the ocean ecosystem. Environmentalist in the USA cheered when California governor Jerry Brown signed a law banning the sale of shark fins.

Main dishes were as follows: Braised Wealth with Abalone, Sea Cucumber, Dried Scallop, and Mushroom, Steamed Vegetable Roll with Sea Moss and Celery, Double Happiness Prawn with Vermicelli, Braised Seafood with Longevity Noodles and the Steamed Harmony Lapu-lapu with Superior Soya Sauce.

I took a sample of each dish with the objective of absorbing the   Wealth, Double Happiness, Longevity and Harmony. But I made certain that I left a tiny portion of fish in my dish; there must be some leftovers – a symbol for abundant provisions in this dragon year.

For dessert, I took a look at Pan Fried Nin Gao with Egg but decided on the Feria’s homemade ice cream and some fresh fruits to complete my culinary journey. It has been a very long and difficult voyage to be constantly eating all those Chinese dishes and wished that my beloved readers could have assisted me in these expeditions.