If you had to choose just one dish to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Dragon, it would have to be "dragon shrimp." That's what the Chinese call lobster, a costly, auspicious food perfect for greeting the lunar new year January 23.
There's lobster all over the San Gabriel Valley, but the sweetest version, symbolizing a sweet future, would have to be the lobster salad (above) at Cafe Fusion in Arcadia.
Large, succulent slices of lobster are lined up on a mountain of apples, pears and mangoes and laced with a light, creamy dressing. Orange slices surround the plate.
Cafe Fusion, which specializes in Taiwanese food, also suggests a plate of assorted cold foods (below) that conveys the idea of family members gathering to share the special dishes of the season.
The cafe's cold plate is nothing like the perfunctory collection of barbecued pork, cold chicken, cuttlefish and so forth that most Chinese restaurants put out.
Instead, you will eat like the Taiwanese, snacking on Taiwanese "caviar," which is smoked mullet roe in rust-colored slices, paired with fresh garlic stem and fluted slices of daikon.
Smoked shark, a country style dish, comes with finely shredded ginger and a soy sauce dip. A sweet and spicy five-flavor dip accompanies boiled squid. Because bamboo shoots are a major crop in Taiwan, you will have fresh bamboo shoot chunks to dip in sweet mayonnaise.
But the most typical Chinese cold dish, says cafe owner Arthur Chen, is fresh water clams, simmered in a mixture of soy sauce, wine, lemon juice, garlic and chile.
In the past, new year foods only appeared for the holiday, but Cafe Fusion has them throughout the year, like glistening pork belly (above) that has been braised for hours with soy sauce and such spices as star anise, Sichuan peppercorns, fennel seeds, cassia bark and orange peel.
In Taiwanese homes, the pork would be set out on a table of foods honoring ancestors, then recooked for the family to eat later.
Chicken and fish are other new year essentials, and so you would have Taiwan's three-cup chicken (above), named for the amounts of soy sauce, sesame oil and wine with which the chicken is cooked. Fresh basil also goes into this dish.
Fish represents prosperity. You can partake of that with a whole black cod steamed with Chinese tree seeds, which are tangy pickled berries with a large seed.
A hot pot of mutton soup (above) is seasonal, only eaten in winter in Taiwan. The aromatic broth is flavored with angelica and chrysanthemum leaves.
Dessert would be a cake of glutinous rice flour and brown sugar that is cut up and pan-fried to make chewy, crisp-edged slices. Chinese markets right now have stacks of the cakes, some plain, some containing red beans, others flavored with coconut.
The most important dinner is New Year's Eve, when family members come home to celebrate, but the festival continues for days after that. And Cafe Fusion has the dessert you would eat on the final day, a sweet clear soup (above) with egg shreds, osmanthus and tiny glutinous rice dumplings filled with sweetened sesame seeds.
Cafe Fusion, 510 E. Live Oak Ave., Arcadia, CA 91006. Tel: (626) 447-6488.
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