Food + money: Via Hot Food Porn's Eddie Lau: The real guide to Chinese New Year food traditions. "Let me help you avoid the bunch of cliché online drivel regarding Chinese restaurant specialties and little Chinese themed recipes," Lau writes. His list: sesame beignets, shrimp chips, mochi cake, and more. And he helpfully offers up a tip-off of rules and superstitions: "Think about this for a second, it's a holiday devoted to stuffing your face with food and stuffing your pockets with money," Lau notes. "It's a total win-win situation." Hmm. If only Thanksgiving ended with a money grab...
And the second-best part is that there's no admission charge. Just pay as you drink. Details on how to register beer-soaked gratitude after the jump.
Normally we'd venture to the South Bay, to San Jose's Santouka, to find a good bowl of tonkotsu ramen. But we won't have to venture that far, now that Izakaya Sozai, which opened last week in the space vacated by the former Sozai, is offering an excellent version.
Not really a ramen restaurant, Izakaya Sozai is a Japanese tapas place. But after doing a sampling of the menu, we're happy to report that the tonkotsu ramen ($8) is exceptional, arguably the best in the city (along with some udon dishes, it's listed on the menu's "After Sake" section). Once you taste the rich broth you'll understand why some people become raving ramen fanatics.
SFoodie: What did Chinese New Year mean for you and your family when you were growing up?:
Tan: That was when all the "relatives" came for all-day rounds of feasting. The relatives also included and friends who were from China. If we did that now, we'd need to rent an auditorium! All the women helped cook. We kids would go outside to rollerskate or ride bikes.
There were the usual assortment of masterfully cooked foods, dishes that symbolized good luck: fish, noodles, pommelos, and dishes -- like a sticky rice noodle or a black mossy seaweed -- whose names sounded like good-luck expressions. My mother would spend days ahead of time pickling a batch of spicy turnips, cooking down shredded pork until it was the texture of sawdust, which melted in your mouth like cotton candy and with a burst of flavor. There was always an infinite variety of treats: watermelon and sunflower seed that would be cracked as people played games. We had preserved plums, a sweet-sticky beef jerky, and See's Candies, always the nuts and chews, not the creamy ones. But for us kids, the food we really looked forward to were pot stickers, both boiled and pan-fried. We often helped roll out a few wretched-looking wrappers. We ate them with vinegar, soy sauce, and sometimes chili sauce. There was always a contest over who could eat the most. And at some special point in the day, the kids received red money envelopes, which contained 50 cents. Calculating for inflation, that would be about $500 in today's money!
