Chinese New Year at Hakkasan.

As you all know by now, I'm a bit of a fan of Dim Sum and Hakkasan. So naturally I had to go and try out their Chinese New Year menu on the day it launched and report back to you all. Well, it's safe to say it didn't disappoint. I took Dad with me, and he loved it just as much as I did!

Chinese New Year is the most important festival in the Chinese calendar, and many families have their own traditions. There is one tradition that many Chinese families follow however, which is the tradition of the wishing tree. The wishing tree tradition began hundreds of years ago, and it involves people writing their wishes for the year onto a piece of paper, and then throwing them onto a tree. 

Dad and I wrote down our wishes, before tucking in to our first course of dim sum.

I had the Hakkasan Kumquat Cocktail, which was especially for Chinese New Year, while Dad had a glass of German Pinot Noir. The dim sum as always was excellent, beautiful scallops and every piece was full of flavour. After the dim sum came the soft shell crab, which was my favourite course of the night. The crab was topped with egg yolk...yep, that huge pile of crumbly pastry looking stuff on top is egg yolk! How clever is that?! It tasted delicious!

The lamb wraps were really really spicy! It's weird, I'm not a massive fan of spicy food, but these tasted so good I kept going back for more (and then calming my mouth down with the cocktail!). Dad wasn't so keen on these, he felt they were a bit of a strange combination with the seafood dim sum and soft shell crab.

After the starters we had a break before moving on to the mains. I always find that the set menu always gives you far too much food, we could have really done with one or two less mains (we had five!). Again two of the dishes were really quite spicy, so be warned if you can't handle spice! However, the abalone rice, the seabass, and the beef were mouthwateringly good. I'm usually not a big rice eater, but I couldn't stop eating the huge bowl of it that was sat next to me.

For dessert was the Kumquat wishing tree with Chocolate, caramelised macadamia, cocoa rocks. I wasn't really sure what to expect with this, but loved the theatrics of having a tree brought to the table with our Kumquats hanging off it.

Historically, people would tie their wish to a small orange or kumquat, and then throw the wish up to hang in the branches of the trees. It was believed that if the wish successfully hung onto one of the branches, the person’s wish would come true. The higher the branch the wish landed on, the more likely it would be for the person’s hopes to be fulfilled. Hence the dessert includes your very own wishing tree and kumquat hanging from it.

The rest of the dessert, the chocolate part, was completely moreish! It was really rich but beautiful, and it left me feeling as though I just wanted a huge slab of it! 

The Hakkasan Chinese New Year menu is well worth it if you fancy a special meal out over the next couple of weeks, just be warned though that it is quite a spicy one, and it's also very filling! At £88.88 each it's actually quite good value, you get nine courses for that price, which means each course is less than £10 each. 

Have you ever had a Chinese New Year meal?