New year brings new menus

Many Chinese restaurants are ringing in the Chinese New Year with new menus and promotions.

Beijing's Sichuan Fandian restaurant recently celebrated its relocation during the Year of the Dragon's approach by reinventing some classic dishes. These include dry-braised beef slices with celery and winter cabbage stewed with duck.

The eatery, which opened in 1959, moved from Rongxian Hutong to Prince Gong's Palace and then to its current location in Xinjiekou.

It has served such State leaders as late premier Zhou Enlai.

Sichuan Fandian used to mostly serve spicy Sichuan-style gongbao and fish flavored dishes.

It still offers such classics as clear-water cabbage, which appears simple but is actually complicated to make, and fish-flavored prawn balls.

New dishes include super spicy bullfrog and eight-mushroom spicy soup.

The average bill is 100 yuan ($16) a head.

As downtown Beijing's Houhai lake becomes frozen enough for skating, the hotpot joint overlooking the lake, Nauge, offers a Vietnamese hotpot set menu served in individual stainless steel pots brought to a boil with two-wick heaters.

The set meal includes beef, scallop, prawns, vegetables and Vietnamese rice noodles along with sour and spicy dips.

The appetizing base soup - made with citronella, lemongrass, lemon and mushrooms - is indeed healthy.

The meal costs 168 yuan a head.

Capital M, located at the northern end of Qianmen Pedestrian Street, offers to organize celebrations until Feb 15.

A new chef from Greece prepares a celebratory menu, starting with a welcome cocktail and canapes enjoyed by the fireplace, followed by a three-course dinner that ends with chocolates and petit fours.

There are two menus, priced at 488 yuan per person, plus a 10-percent surcharge, with a 12-person minimum.

The restaurant will close from Jan 22-27 and reopen for dinner on Jan 28.

Shunfeng, a Cantonese restaurant with more than 20 years of history in Beijing, recently opened its ninth restaurant in Fengtai district.

It's a relatively remote location, but the area 1 km south of Kefengqiao on Southwest Fourth Ring Road is near several big enterprises' headquarters.

The Fengtai eatery has 32 humongous private rooms and a banquet hall big enough to accommodate 500. The grand decor is suitable for business meals.

The restaurant offers an array of seafood, traditional fried Cantonese dishes and popular dishes from Sichuan and Hunan cuisines.

Qianmen Quan Ju De - arguably Beijing's most famous Peking roast duck eatery, with 148 years of history - will fuse traditional duck dishes with international fare for Spring Festival.

In 2011, the eatery developed new dishes based on cuisines from Japan, Korea, India and Thailand.

Highlights of the Spring Festival menu include Korean-style spicy beef, "dragon and phoenix" sushi, Indian curry duck, Thai-style duck breast and Singaporean-style lobster with noodles.

Set meals cost between 2,380 yuan and 3,380 yuan for 10.