China Blue, Conrad Manila’s new Chinese restaurant, marks its first Chinese New Year with two set menus, including Yee Sang, that bring health and prosperity.

Conrad Manila welcomes the Year of the Rooster at China Blue, the hotel by the bay’s award-winning Chinese restaurant, with two sets of New Year’s menu designed to bring loads of luck while satisfying discriminating palates during the lunar New Year season.

Available until Feb. 2, both menus come with a huge serving of Yee Sang or prosperity salad consisting of various shredded vegetables, olive oil, plum sauce, prawns, peanuts, sesame seeds, and shredded salmon, which diners get to mix and toss with their chopsticks to attract luck, prosperity, and good health. Tradition has it that the higher the toss, the more auspicious the New Year will be.

Gold and red, fish and round

Adopted from ethnic Chinese living in Malaysia and Singapore, the tradition is now widely practiced in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and various parts of the world with big ethnic Chinese communities, including the Philippines.

China Blue, which opened only last July in Manila, offers dishes created by Hong Kong-born chef Jereme Leung. There are also other China Blue restaurants in other cities such as Shanghai and Tokyo. Although all of them offer “modern” Chinese cuisine with Cantonese roots, no two restaurants offer the same items. Each China Blue outlet tries to be unique by offering diners its own set of dishes.

Malaysian chef Engyew Khorr did a special menu for journalists and food bloggers recently combining key dishes from China Blue’s Menu A (P28,888 net) and Menu B (P38,888 net).  Each menu, which consists of eight courses served lauriat-style, is good for groups of up to 10 people.

“Most of the dishes featured in these special menus are served only once a year for a purpose,” said Mary Jane Domingo, Conrad Manila’s Chinese operations manager. “To the Chinese, it symbolize prosperity. But Chef Khorr gave each dish his own twist.”

A classic example is the “money bag” in dry scallop sauce. Instead of stuffing it with meat, the chef filled each soft, edible bag with steamed seafood and mushroom.

In lieu of “plums” or other fruits, the chef created faux “pears,” which are actually made of glutinous rice. Each green pear dumpling, green being the color of health among the Chinese, is actually stuffed with minced deep-fried smoke duck.

And what’s a Chinese dinner without fish, another Chinese symbol of prosperity that dates back to hundreds, perhaps thousands of years? The simple yet flavorful steamed live garoupa with soya sauce and spring onion was a perfect foil to the preceding dish, which was the rich stir-fried lobster with golden broth XO sauce.

Chef Khorr then combined braised abalone, another traditional symbol of good luck, with black mushroom and sea moss roll with dried oyster.

Garnished with preserved duck meat and Chinese New Year sausage, the wok-fried rice teemed with the right flavors and aroma. It was a meal in itself. As was typical in all lauriats, it was served last, which was too bad since we hardly had any room left to fully savor it.

For dessert, the chef whipped up two items—chilled sweetened black glutinous rice puree with coconut ice cream, and deep-pried banana with Chinese New Year cake. The two dessert dishes weren’t the end of it.

Domingo, whose also in charge of the special gift packages to be offered to diners during the entire season, also made us sample traditional Chinese tikoy or niangao shaped in the form of miniature koi fish and gold bars. The gift packages (R1,488 each), which consist of several pieces of tikoy, comes in a beautiful  round box in bright red and see-through sections.

Almost all Chinese restaurants will be offering their diners tikoy (sweet, sticky delicacies made of glutinous rice) either to share with family members on the dinner table or to give away as gifts to friends. Tikoy, which comes in the shape of koi, has been a favorite gift item. But Domingo thought of presenting them this time in smaller sizes.

“I think we’re the first and so far only Chinese restaurant in the country to offer these goodies in cute little sizes,” she said. “Celebrations begin on the evening of the 27th, as Chinese families welcome the New Year. It continues lunchtime of the 28th.”

In fact, Domingo added, the celebrations will be more festive at China Blue on the 28th since they plan to transport a piece of China in the restaurant through Chinese musicians and street food hawkers.

“On Jan. 27, 28, and 29, which is a Sunday, we will also be giving away red packets containing gold coins,” she said. “Of course, they’re not actually gold coins, but gold tinfoil containing round-shaped chocolate.”