Yesterday, my family and I celebrated Chinese New Year in the grand old traditional way -- by going out to a Hong Kong style restaurant and feasting on Dim Sum (yum!). The latter name is Cantonese for "Morsels touching the heart." If you've never had Dim Sum, it is a meal consisting entirely of bite-sized 'appetizers' in the form of many savoury steamed and golden-fried dumplings, spring rolls, and many other tasty little items. A typical selection includes sweet custards, stuffed vegetables, sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves, and stewed spareribs in black bean sauce. Colour, fragrance, taste, and shape are important elements of the culinary artistry.

All the steamed items are served in cleverly stacked bamboo baskets (the same ones in which they were cooked), and everything is washed down with plenty of good oolong tea. The most famous and beloved of Dim Sum specialities are "Har Gow," which is a steamed shrimp dumpling folded into a ridged half-moon pocket, using a delicate and translucent rice-flour wrapping; and "Shui-Mye," an open-topped dumpling containing a delicious fluffy steamed-pork filling. But at lunch there were other traditional items like tempura-fried cuttlefish tentacles (which my non-Chinese relatives discovered they enjoyed), and stewed soft chicken feet (which is a big-time favorite Dim Sum item). In general I like nearly everything on the menu.

Because it was the Spring Festival, the restaurant brought in Lion Dancers and gongs to celebrate the New Year. Each two-man Lion Dancer has a front head-end mask (which looks like a huge dragon head) operated by the first man; and a tail-end section operated by the second man. The colourful mask has mobile furry ears and blinking bubble eyes, as well as a moveable lower jaw. The waitors gave us red packets which patrons then fill with lucky money in order to 'feed' the Lion acrobats. Using highly ritualized movements to the beat of a thrumming gong, the acrobats 'trap' the red packages in the jaws of the mask by jumping on each others' shoulders and rolling and tumbling inside their Lion costumes. Robert (my three year old nephew) 'fed' the Lions, but he was a little too fast -- one is supposed to play a game of cat and mouse with the dancers before letting them 'capture' the prize. :-)

Incidentally I've never seen a Lion Dance done inside a closed area before -- it was very LOUD inside the walled room, but for some reason all the gong noise did not leave my ears ringing...

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The kitchen staff hung up several high poles each with a lettuce head, red packet money, and firecrackers for the dancers to capture and take down, all to much applause.