"Kung Hei Fat Choi!"....such a common greeting back home, regardless of whether or not you were Chinese! Filipinos love celebrations and will grab the opportunity to celebrate any occasion, even if not necessarily theirs :) Anyway, despite being many years here, I still miss the chants of old. There's a huge Chinese community in the Philippines and their customs and ways have somehow integrated itself into the Filipino culture!
One thing i miss mostly is "Tikoy" a.k.a. Chinese rice cake! Sad to say, I haven't seen any shop here that sells this.
So on a mission to find this tikoy...i dragged hubby down to the China Club at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Deira in the hope that they may be selling some! When we got to the restaurant, the waiters greeted me with “Kung
Hei Fat Choi!” and I happily returned their greeting and asked excitedly if
they had Tikoy. “Unfortunately, no” they said, as it wasn’t popular here but
the closest thing they had to it was the fried pumpkin cake, served during the Yum Cha
Brunch they were having that day! Yum Cha is a Chinese style morning or afternoon tea, which involves drinking Chinese tea and eating dim sum dishes.
At China Club, they serve fantastic dim sum dishes on a trolley, that kept going around the tables, refilling your plates until you tell them to stop. We slid in to a booth and looked at the scrumptious dimsum menu which came with soups, noodles and unlimited chinese tea, lemon ice tea or peach ice tea for AED 99/- ...what a bargain!
This is what we ate....well, actually half of what we ate :)
I got my tikoy fix from the fried pumpkin cake which are the orange looking donuts on the plate. It did taste a bit similar to tikoy but less sweeter.
The dimsum is very good and among the best you can find in town! (believe me, I have searched long and far to find this out) so despite the hotel being a good 40 kms from our home, it definitely is a must go, must eat place! And I wIll always keep coming back!
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