A Chinese wedding has many of the trappings of a Western marriage and in addition rituals, traditions and matters of etiquette to follow. In our series on Chinese weddings, we break these down and tell you how to get everything right.
Go to enough Chinese wedding banquets and you will notice that the same types of dish – chicken, fish, roast suckling pig among others – are always on the menu.
This is because the names of wedding banquet dishes are homonyms of phrases with auspicious, or lucky, meanings. There are subtle differences in these names from province to province in China, with bigger variations in Chinese communities around Asia.
These names are taken very seriously – so seriously that a slip-up can cause a barrage of complaints. In some such cases, newlyweds have refused to pay for the banquet.
“That is why we must get these details right,” says Jayson Tang, executive Chinese chef of the JW Marriott Hotel Hong Kong in Admiralty, on Hong Kong Island.