Dragon & Pheonix come to dinner

Image by infomatique via Flickr

Year of the Rabbit celebration in Dublin.

Lotus Cafe in Hackensack is serving a special menu for the Year of the Rabbit (4709), with seafood and meat options sure to please any Chinese New Year celebrant.

We enjoyed a bountiful meal Saturday night -- with lobster, shrimp, scallops and other seafood; chicken, greens, tofu and noodles (for longevity). 

We started with a soup from the regular menu -- spinach and creamy tofu for two ($4.95) -- and it was enough for three of us. Then, the waiter brought our two entrees from the New Year's menu and a noodle dish from the regular menu:

• Dragon & Pheonix -- Maine lobster in a ginger-and-scallion sauce with five-spice fried chicken on the side ($29).
• Fish & Leaves -- flounder fillet and velvet egg white mounded over sauteed snow-pea shoots ($18).
• X.O. Seafood E-Mein -- braised noodles with shrimp, scallop, squid, and fish cake in an X.O. sauce of anchovies, shrimp roe and dried scallops ($14.95).

Service was excellent, as usual, and I sipped my own Korean soju during the meal at our favorite Chinese restaurant.

We ordered two of the six dishes on the special menu, which is being served through Feb. 13, so we'll have the chance to go back and try the others.

My wife and son are eating meat, but I'm not, so I'm looking forward to sweet-and-spicy Walnut Scallops. They can choose from Tangerine-Braised Duck with steamed buns, X.O. Shrimp and Steak Kew, or Happy Family Meat-Ball Casserole with fish tempura, quail eggs and crab stick.

If you go on the weekend, reservations are recommended. You'll have to ask for the special New Year menu when you sit down.

You'll find a wonderful discussion of the Chinese New Year at Diva Indoors: Food, with love. Click on the following link:

Enter the Year of the Rabbit!

Lotus Cafe, 450 Hackensack Ave., in the Home Depot Shopping Center, 
Hackensack; 201-488-7070. BYO.