Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Events Gong Xi Gong Xi! An Amazing Evening at the Chinese New Year Banquet
Posted by Nicki Wood on Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:16 AM
I won't bore you with descriptions of dishes at Sunday night's Chinese New Year Banquet, although each one bested the previous one in spectacular fashion. But here are some highlights of the evening.
1. I expected to know only about three people, all of them at my table. Pleasant surprise, then, to see the Scene braintrust of Ridley, Silverman and Haruch in attendance.
2. Veteran journalist Anne Paine (of another media outlet) does NOT wish to be kissed by the dancing Chinese lion, and I have the photograph to prove it.
3. Our Chinese hostess urged, "Use your hands," to tackle savory foods like duck and fish. When do you ever hear that at a restaurant dinner party?
4. If you were born in the Year of the Ox, go shopping for a purple cloth or wall-hanging and put it in the southwest corner of your house for the year. And watch out for gossip.
5. If you really love Chinese food and have trouble finding it (as many frequent comments in Bites imply), make every attempt to attend next year's banquet.
6. It's not too late to eat some really long noodles for good luck this year.
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The first course was a gelatinous miso soup — very tasty, though a bit glutinous in texture for me. Next up was a marvelous appetizer trio of salmon sashimi in long noodle-like shreds, cool roast pork in thin slices, and triangles of deep-fried tofu with an appealing cottage-cheesy texture inside.
I may have these mixed up, but next, as I recall, were fat shrimp and silver-dollar-sized sea scallops in a peppery sauce, nestled in a deep-fried latticework of either potato or taro root fashioned into a catcher's mitt of a basket. The duck course was quite good, sliced into thick chunks with the crispy skin and fat glistening. Perhaps the most dramatic presentation of the night was the whole fried fish pictured above, served with thick filets enfolded within: the hoisin-ish sauce that pooled at the bottom had us excavating away with forks.
I loved the dish of sauteed mushrooms and baby bok choi, which evidently many tables left untouched. By that point, I was grateful for vegetables. (Let it be noted also that the restaurant didn't know a vegetarian was seated at our table, and on the fly they produced vegetable dishes to satisfy her — including a plate of sushi that the whole table envied.)
Our favorite, though, was the penultimate dish of long multi-colored noodles with spicy ground meat. Steve was instructed to mix the piles of noodles, separated by color, by raising them in tongfuls: the higher you raised them, the better the mix of colors and distribution of toppings. (Okay, so maybe eight feet was a little high.) They were perfectly al dente, and Steve was right that the subtle five-spice blend got better with every forkful. I didn't try the lichee-almond dessert — when you get a mental image of Monty Python's Mr. Creosote, put down the chopsticks.
I'd go again in a second — though the highlight for me was watching Steve's little boy Emmett (a model of good behavior and patience) gape in wonder as the lion dancer wound through the narrow, crowded spaces between tables. File the whole experience under "things every Nashvillian should try."
What Pink said. Agree the soup was a little gummy, but everything else was great. Loved the noodles! Good times!
My faves were the fried fish and the noodles. Dessert was three cubes of layered litchi-coconut gelatin in a fruit broth with fresh fruit, and it was light and full of interesting flavors and textures. The whole meal was that same combination of traditional and inventive--traditional banquet foods with inventive, fusion-y elements, beautifully executed.
Hey, here's some further celebration of the Year of the Dragon. The Chinese Arts Alliance is doing a full evening of dance at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 3, at Ingram Hall at Vanderbilt Blair School of Music. The magnificent 60-foot dragon will make an appearance. http://www.chineseartsalliance.org.
It was a little odd, I agree. I figured they'd previously experienced plates coming back to the kitchen with all the rice still intact. There was so much else to fill up on. But, yes, rice would have been traditional.
When I spent a week in China on a business trip, the only rice we got was as part of a dessert at the end of one meal. Admittedly we were a bunch of Americans, so I don't know how traditional all the meals were that we experienced, but we were all completely carb-starved by he end of the week.
They certainly weren't like any meals I've ever eaten in the States, so I'm guessing at least many of the dishes were traditional. Or possibly dares to see if we would actually eat the sea urchin/tripe/chicken heads/jellyfish. I tried them all.
