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Singapore celebrates New Year
05/02/2008 14:32 - (SA)
Singapore - Chopsticks clash in the air as diners shout out wishes and toss their raw fish salads high into the air at Singapore's legendary Lai Wah restaurant.
The scene at the retro-feel restaurant that invented the "yu sheng" salad is not exactly what head chef Tham Yu Kai planned 40 years ago, when he invented the dish.
It's better, said chef Vincent Lim, who worked under Tham.
"He wanted to make a simple dish with a consistent taste that everyone could enjoy," said Lim.
What he made was a cultural icon - Singapore's must-eat Lunar New Year dish, which has caught on in Chinese communities in Malaysia and Hong Kong.
One of Singapore's revered "Four Heavenly Culinary Kings", whose Cantonese cooking helped define the city state's tastes in the 1960s and 1970s, Tham planned to expand a hawker stall dish of raw fish slices with ginger, chilli and lime.
With "yu", fish, an auspicious symbol and dish in all Chinese communities because the word is a homonym for abundance, and "sheng" meaning raw, a homonym for life, the new dish's name was a winner with auspicious-food-fixated Lunar New Year crowds.
Tradition pleases customers
Sometime after yu sheng's unveiling for Lunar New Year 1964, diners decided to "toss luck" - "lo hei" in Cantonese - and throw Tham's 27-ingredient salad above their tables while shouting out wishes for the new year, Lim explained.
Four decades on, the tossing, shouting, and innovation continues as Lunar New Year approaches.
Yu sheng with caviar, birds nests, a sprinkling of gold dust, parma ham, and Japanese sashimi, are all on this year's competitive festive season menus.
But Lai Wah has not modernised either its signature dish, or its frozen-in-time decor of mosaic tiled floors and white table cloths, since Tham died in 1996.
It's this deference to tradition that pleases loyal, mostly word-of-mouth, customers who order up to 100 yu sheng a night.
The ritual begins when the generous plate, piled high with a colourful blend of sweet potato, radish, ginger, jellyfish, carrots, sesame seeds, crushed peanuts and fried flour crackers, topped with a fresh-made homemade plum sauce, arrives.
Held aloft by a waitress, many of whom are Lai Wah veterans of 20 or more years, lime is deftly squeezed onto the slices of raw mackerel, cinnamon and pepper sprinkled on, then the fish and other ingredients are added.
The expert, enthusiastic, tossing begins soon after.
"I hope to win a new car", shouted one young man.
"I hope for more money this year," cried a middle-aged man.
"I hope my baby will be healthy and happy," cooed a mother with an infant in her arms.
Old ways were best
At first crunchy bite, a myriad of flavours hits your tastebuds - sweet, spicy, sour. Neither too dry nor too wet, it is the perfect appetizer, even for salad-dodgers.
"If you don't like vegetables, at least start with the crackers," Wong advised. "Then you'll end up liking everything else."
Looking proudly at the scene which is set to be played out thousands of times during the 15-day period of welcome for the Year of the Rat, Wong reflected that the old ways were best.
"Some customers like salmon, so if they ask for it we add it," he said. "But otherwise we keep it to the same way it was prepared back in 1964. This is where it started, so we want to keep everything authentic."
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