Chinese Wedding Banquet

A friend was fortunate to attend a Chinese Wedding over the weekend. Below are excerpts from the menu and program booklet:

Banquet Menu (I will replace with slightly lsize arger later)


Banquet Menu


Preceding the formal religious ceremony, there was a Chinese Tea Ceremony


Chinese Wedding Traditions


Chinese Characters

That "Chinese Wedding Door Game" sounds like a helluva of a lot of "fun."

Is the number 13 (there are 13 courses in the wedding banquet) considered lucky in traditional Chinese culture?
Thanks for posting, Cathy--very interesting.

I love how it is all explained - I've run into many of these traditions, but never knew the meanings behind them. I especially enjoyed the caveat about how filling the food is!

I also had the honor of attending a Chinese Wedding Banquet just this last month. The menu shared many items but differed slightly:


The Menu


Barbecue Assortment Platter


Fresh Prawn Salad with Glazed Walnuts


Abalone and Peapods Stir-Fried with XO Sauce


Shark Fin Soup


Pekin Duck (sorry, all I got was the sandwich I made for myself)


Lobster


Crispy Fried Chicken


Smoked Black Cod


Fried Rice with more Black Cod in the background

Sorry, I did not photograph the red bean puree or the wedding cake. I barely even ate the rice. By the end of this all, I was very very full.

Edited to add the photo of the prawns that I somehow had forgotten

Were these banquets at restaurants? If so, which restaurants and how was the food? Thank you.

This banquet was at Hong Kong East Ocean in Emeryville, CA.

If you happen to be looking for a scenic spot in the Bay Area, this one is very nice. It's at the end of the Emeryville pier, adjacent to the Bay Bridge and looking back at San Francisco across the bay.

The food was good. i remember enjoying some of the barbecue platter (specifically the virginal barbecue pork), the prawn salad and the abalone dish very much. Fullness started to set in around this point. But the crackling peking duck sandwiches are always a crowd pleaser and the smoked fillet of cod was a touch heavy on the smoke, but otherwise very moist and flavorful.

Honk Kong East Ocean
3199 Powell Street
Emeryville, CA 94608
(510) 655-3388

Yes, 13 is a lucky number (at least in Cantonese; can't vouch for other dialects). I believe that it follows from 3 being lucky, not from any intrinsic value to 13.

I've actually never seen an English menu accompanying a wedding banquet -- the ones I've been to have always just had stupendous quantities of food spontaneously appear. And yes, these are always in restaurants. You can't cater something that huge off-site! The trade in wedding/family/business banquets explains why Chinese restaurants are often so vast. In crowded urban China, people don't often entertain at home; the same went for crowded Chicago ethnic neighborhoods 100 years ago, which explains why we have so many social-club and auditorium buildings (not to mention corner dive bars) around town.