The joys of spending time with family over a Chinese banquet, exchange of red envelopes and the Lion Dance makes Chinese New Year one of my favourite times of the year.

We celebrated the Year of the Snake with a 7-course Chinese banquet ($66 pp plus drinks) at Dragon Palace followed by dessert at Meet Fresh and then pizza at our Crust last night (burger boy couldn’t make it to dinner so we delivered him take-away, our short visit to Crust resulted in my family craving pizza).

We started with the Sliced Raw Salmon with Oriental Salad. It is tradition to mix the lucky salad together as a family…

The raw salmon was fresh and mixed with the sweet & crunchy oriental salad made me forget all about the texture of the salmon. I even went in for seconds!

Next up was the Shark’s Fin with Abalone Soup…

I love this soup with spoonfuls of Chinese vinegar.

The main event, the braised lobster with supreme sauce was so fresh and succulent…

I was close to not taking a photo of the Steamed Fresh Coral Trout  but the wonderful little miss bacon rearranged the trout for me so it wasn’t looking at me. Side note –  I have a weak stomach especially when I can visualise what I’m eating just before it ends up on my plate. 

The trout just melted in our mouths, it was fresh and soft.

The Stewed Chicken with Special Sauce was probably my least favourite. It was twist on the usual chicken but I felt was a little bit plain.

I usually have this Glutinous Rice in Lotus Leaf at dim sum so very cool to have it for dinner, it had plenty of meat and I love that it’s a giant version

I had three bowls of this Mango & Grapefruit dessert with Sago…

It was an interesting twist to the usual sago dessert.

We were impressed by the Chinese New Year lion dance. There were four lions, a joker and of course fire crackers…

When my brother and I were kids, we used to be scared of the lion dance because we didn’t know underneath were just martial arts lion dancers so our ongoing joke is that one of us is going to cry when the lion dance starts

After our 7-course Chinese banquet at Dragon Palace we decided to go for a wander through Northbridge to see what other Chinese New Year festivities were happening. We however couldn’t get past Meet Fresh so we ended up having dessert.

I had the supreme mango ice crush with condensed milk and vanilla ice-cream…

I love condensed milk and I love mango so this was a sure winner. Even sharing the dessert amongst 4, we couldn’t get through it.

My bro and little miss bacon’s favourite Meet Fresh dessert, the Herbal Dessert with coconut jelly…

They’ve been having this dessert 3 times a week since Meet Fresh opened!

My Chinese mamma had the warm herbal jelly, she’s usually the last to finish her meal but she came in second last night – must have been good!

We then headed to our crust in Mount Lawley to deliver burger boy’s dinner. Whilst we were there my bro had a craving for pizza so little miss bacon made him up one of our new pizzas officially launching in March to take home…

It didn’t make it home. We all had a couple of slices, yep after a 7-course Chinese banquet. So that was Chinese New Year’s Eve, now we are going over to my Chinese mamma’s for a BBQ pork and roast pork lunch.

I wish everyone wonderful Year of the Snake, may it bring you many amazing foodie experiences and a prosperous year ahead!

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