Rare Lunar New Year fare makes it to big screen

From the mountains in Chongqing to a historical village in Hong Kong, the two-team crew trekked to 35 areas across the country in a hunt for more than 60 delicacies.

But due to limited screen time, only 43 dishes from 24 areas are represented in the 85-minute feature.

The total unedited footage comprises 10,000 minutes.

The job of tracking the delicacies also led to surprise finds.

As Chen and his team were looking for a dish in Southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, they accidentally found a mouth-watering dish of pork in a local restaurant.

"The flavor was amazing. We've done lots of online research but we had never heard of the dish called songpikou (pork mixed with taro)," says Chen.

The restaurant owner introduced them to the cook, a local farmer around 60 years old, who usually takes at least six hours to cook the dish.

The process includes boiling the streaky pork, poking holes in the meat, frying the meat and then mixing it with fried taro before steaming everything for 40 minutes.

Alongside the food, the human stories in the film are also interesting.

A Guangdong martial arts practitioner uses the festival banquet as a social networking platform to introduce his son to veterans of the art; a Taiwan woman returns to her hometown from Beijing to rediscover the flavors she has been missing.