The big ole chinese banquet

or in my case my big fat chinese engagement party. ok so one of the first things that i needed to tackle after i became engaged was the engagement party. i kid you not, i was engaged on friday night, wasn't able to tell anyone until saturday afternoon (due to no cell phone reception unless you were on top of some mountain) and by sunday dinner (mid autumn festival) i was confronted with the prospects of having an engagement party.

i quickly had to decide what kind of affair it would be. there is the totally economical, have a party at our home, which i had to ix nay due to the sheer number of guests that will be invited. the alternative was to find a restaurant that can accomodate the 80-90 guests and still wont break the bank and or cost the same as if we were to have a wedding 2 months from the date. chris and i both come from big families and there is no way that my modest southern brooklyn block would be able to park that many cars, its a virtual impossibilty. so upon discussion with mom, it was decided that we would have a 10 course chinese dinner at one of the new chinese restaurants that opened up in my area. the decision was pretty easy. i had considered if i wanted a chinese banquet for my future wedding and decided that i didn't want a gaudy chinese wedding with trumpet and lion dances accompanied by a 10 course cantonese family style dinner. so a good compromise to show my future husbands family what my culture is all about, we settled on having a chinese engagement banquet.

a 15 minute walk or a 5 minute drive from my humble abode, we chose spring garden chinese restaurant. we met with the restaurant manager over dim sum and discussed menu. i have to admit this was pretty painless. most chinese restaurants have prefixe chinese banquet menus, but considering we're going to be having a lot of non chinese guests, we couldn't really use any of the prefixed menus that were available to us, so we had to get a little creative with the dish selections so that we can accomodate less adventurous palates. an auntie probably never heard of abalone and will most likely be weirded out by its slimy appearance. or our tree hugger cousin may think that shark fin soup is animal cruelty and sic peta on us or something. so we changed some of the more exotic dishes and replaced them with something that will be more audience friendly to people of all cultures. in the end i think we did pretty good. momma tse did a good job negotiating the menu down so no complaints from me.