The Globe and Mail
Published February 7, 2021
DARRYL DYCK/The Globe and Mail
The Fish Man’s Lunar New Year menu is a lavish, six-course feast brimming with symbols of prosperity that are particularly meaningful this year. It was during last year’s festival, usually the busiest time for Chinese restaurants, that COVID-19 crept in with an advance attack and business began drying up.
At this spicy Sichuan restaurant, which I highly recommend, the new year’s spread includes lobes of sea urchin served over softly steamed eggs in spiky round shells that look like purses overflowing with gold ingots; plump spot prawns coated in salted duck-egg yolk, a homophone for laughter (the Cantonese pronunciation of prawn sounds like “ha”); and a massive sour cabbage hotpot – the restaurant’s signature dish – bobbing with a whole barramundi (a sea bass also known as osmanthus cod) expertly carved around the bones with tail intact that represents not just a good start and end to the year, but also abundance when the flower blooms.