This February, dim sum teahouse Yauatcha celebrates its first Chinese New Year in Houston! Just the other week I had the chance to preview the Chinese New Year Menu at Yauatcha. Let me just say my mouth is watering as I recall the delicious feast they rolled out for us. Chinese New Year menu with dishes inspired by the annual celebration and featuring ingredients that are traditionally believed to bring good fortune. The menu will offer two dim sum dishes; salted egg yolk custard sesame ball (representing togetherness) and Chilean sea bass roll (symbolizing financial prosperity). Main dishes include golden fortune prawn in lime sauce (for seafood has connotations of good luck) and stir-fried duck breast with hazelnut in mala sauce. In a nod to the art, guests will enjoy the Haoyun Lantern petit gâteau dessert with soy caramel and mandarin (eating citrus is believed to bring luck whilst ‘haoyun’ translates as ‘lucky’). A number of limited edition macarons will also be available, in flavors including vanilla orchid, a lucky flower for 2018, and raspberry Szechuan, vibrant red in color to reflect Chinese New Year celebrations.
The London-based restaurant, which debuted its first U.S.-based locations — Waikiki and Houston — in 2017, commissioned two leading London artists to create innovative Chinese lantern art installations for its restaurants across the globe, from London to Mumbai, Houston to Waikiki. This truly global celebration also includes a special menu featuring the contemporary Cantonese dim sum for which the restaurant is renowned.
With the Year of the Dog beginning today, the stunning artworks will be on display in the restaurants throughout the month of February and through the first week of March. Each artist is interpreting and celebrating the Chinese paper lantern — an iconic emblem of Chinese New Year— in a modern way with designs that tell a visual story. This campaign has evolved from Yauatcha’s annual red lantern Chinese New Year decorations, a tradition which began at the Michelin-starred Soho restaurant five years ago.
The two artists, Lydia Kasumi Shireff and Jamie Julien Brown, were selected on the merit of their existing works, which caught the eye of the Yauatcha team. Yauatcha Houston will feature the work of Jamie Julien Brown, whose work was spotted in the Met Museum, New York City, where his piece ‘mini totem lights’ shows its similarities with the traditional Chinese lantern shape in form
and vibrancy of colors. For his display, Jamie is evolving his totem sculptures to become hanging lanterns. Inspired by the diverse color palette of Yauatcha’s dim sum and patisserie dishes, he is creating metre-high totem pole-style stacked lanterns in various colours, shapes, sizes, textures and patterns. Brown’s work will also appear in Yauatcha Soho.
