A Formal Meal for Six

The pictures below illustrate a typical formal meal for six from start to finish.  These dishes were served in a Hunan-style restaurant in Nanjing Celebrity City Hotel on Chinese New Years, 2007.  The meal took place in a private room at a round table.
 
A meal starts with a toast given by the host.  Toasts continue throughout the meal with individuals, couples or families toasting other individuals, couples or families.  This meal was a family meal so only one bottle of red wine was consumed.  A business meal would almost certainly involve much more alcohol.
 
Appetizers are always served first. Ideally there should be a variety of flavors represented such as sweet, salty, bitter and/or spicy.  At the beginning of this feast there was spicy tripe with peanuts, cucumber with garlic, spicy jelly, the famous Nanjing Salty Duck, red dates and preserved duck eggs.

 
One or two soups should be served during a meal. A soup is often the largest most elaborate dish, but in this case it was not.  The soup on the top right of the photo below contains fish, eggs, carrot and bamboo.

 
The server’s job is to stand nearby and wait for some of the existing dishes to be at least partially eaten before bringing out the next round.

 
A typical meal will contain one or more signature dishes.  This restaurant featured a dish of duck's foot and abalone all covered in abalone sauce.  Dishes are usually placed in the middle of the table for all to share, but this specific dish was served on a plate - one for each guest.

 
New dishes are served as the ones already on the table are eaten. The new dishes in the picture are beef with spicy green peppers (bottom-left), spicy goose with garlic (top-left) and beans mixed with peppers and pork (top-right).

 
Several minutes later fish (左口鱼, zuǒkǒuyú ) and lobsters cut lengthwise were served. 

 
The 10-inch long lobsters are covered in garlic and onion.


After most of the main dishes are served it is common to have some snacks, noodles, or rice. In this case we enjoyed some small snacks and green vegetables.

 
Soup featuring pork and corn was the final dish of the evening.

 
Watermelon or other fruits are very commonly served for dessert.

 
In a feast like this not everything is eaten. In fact it can be quite a challenge to finish all of the dishes at a typical Chinese meal. Chinese hosts often order too many dishes with little reason other than to offer their guests a wide variety of choices and ensure an excellent meal. Guests may choose to bring the leftovers home with them.