Bear’s paw and monkey brain? Not in this US$2,000 Manchu-Han imperial banquet in Hong Kong
Chef who was part of the team behind the 1977 ‘imperial’ feast in Hong Kong is planning a modern interpretation, minus the taboo ingredients
It was not a single meal but a multi-day culinary marathon, traditionally consisting of 108 dishes served over three days in six separate banquets. The scale was almost unimaginable – some accounts list more than 300 different dishes.
The feast was notorious for ingredients that the modern palate would find distasteful: bear’s paw, orangutan lips, elephant’s trunk, leopard fetus and monkey brain, made infamous by films such as Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Tsui Hark’s The Chinese Feast (1995).
The menu also included many ingredients still prized today, such as fish maw, bird’s nest, sea cucumber and abalone, as well as mushrooms like lion’s mane.
The two-day feast, which consisted of four meals, was priced at HK$100,000 for 12 guests – almost the same as the cost of a 500 sq ft flat in the area during that time – and took three months to prepare.
“The lucky guests were a group of Japanese television celebrities who are in Hongkong to make a documentary on Chinese food,” said a report in the South China Morning Post dated November 3, 1977.