Chinese New Year 2026 Reunion Dinner Review
Perched on Level 3 of the Pan Pacific Singapore at Marina Square, Hai Tien Lo has long been regarded as one of the city’s premier destinations for refined Cantonese cuisine. For Chinese New Year 2026, the acclaimed restaurant unveils its Fortune Blessing Menu, a meticulously curated celebration of tradition and culinary artistry that begins at $168++ per person. Over the course of an evening that felt less like dinner and more like a ceremonial passage through the Lunar calendar’s most auspicious flavours, I discovered why this establishment continues to command such reverence among Singapore’s discerning diners.
Ambience: Where Heritage Meets Contemporary Grace
Stepping into Hai Tien Lo feels like entering a carefully orchestrated sanctuary where old-world elegance converses quietly with modern sophistication. The dining room stretches before you in subdued grandeur, its high ceilings painted in soft ivory and accented with crimson flourishes that whisper rather than shout their festive intentions. For the Chinese New Year season, the space has been adorned with deliberate restraint: delicate branches of plum blossoms arc from celadon vases, their pale pink petals caught in pools of warm amber light from overhead pendants.
The colour palette is a study in balance. Charcoal grey chairs with champagne gold piping frame tables dressed in crisp white linens, each setting appointed with cobalt-rimmed porcelain and chopsticks that rest on miniature jade stands. Against the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Marina Bay skyline glitters like scattered diamonds on velvet, providing a dramatic counterpoint to the restaurant’s hushed, almost reverential atmosphere. Even at half capacity, the room hums with a sense of occasion, conversations modulated to match the space’s inherent dignity.
What strikes most profoundly is the lighting. Unlike many Chinese restaurants that favour harsh brightness, Hai Tien Lo embraces shadow and nuance. Table lamps cast intimate circles of warm light, creating small islands of privacy even in the open dining room. The effect is cinematic: faces glow softly across from one another, steam from arriving dishes catches and diffuses the light into translucent veils, and the entire scene takes on the quality of a painting in which every element has been positioned with painterly precision.
Service moves through this space like water, present when needed, invisible when not. Servers dressed in tailored black jackets with mandarin collars navigate between tables with choreographed efficiency, pouring tea in a continuous arc, adjusting plates by millimetres, their movements economical and assured. There is theatre here, but it is understated theatre, the kind that doesn’t demand applause but earns it nonetheless.
The Ceremonial Overture: Yusheng
Every reunion dinner demands its ritual commencement, and at Hai Tien Lo, this arrives in the form of their signature yusheng platter, a kaleidoscopic arrangement that transforms the table into a still life worthy of Dutch masters. Presented on an oversized white plate edged in gold, the raw fish salad sprawls outward in concentric rings of colour: salmon sashimi the hue of coral reefs, translucent jellyfish shimmering like ice crystals, emerald strips of cucumber, carrot ribbons oxidized to burnt orange, and pickled ginger blushing the palest pink.
The lo hei ceremony begins with the server’s invitation to gather round. Chopsticks rise in unison, and the tossing commences to a chorus of auspicious phrases. What follows is controlled chaos: ingredients cascade and tumble, plum sauce drizzles like liquid amber, crushed peanuts scatter like confetti, and the entire composition undergoes a metamorphosis from ordered geometry to exuberant tangle.
The first bite reveals layers of texture and temperature. The salmon, freshly sliced and pristine, yields with silken resistance against the teeth before melting into clean, oceanic sweetness. Jellyfish provides crunch with an almost crystalline snap, each strand coated in sesame oil that leaves a nutty residue on the palate. The vegetables contribute vegetal brightness and moisture, while the crispy wonton strips, golden and fragile, shatter into a thousand shards of savoury satisfaction. The plum sauce ties it all together with its sweet-tart alchemy, though I found myself wishing for a touch more citrus to cut through the richness.
What impressed most was the balance. In lesser hands, yusheng becomes a muddled mess, ingredients competing rather than complementing. Here, every element had a purpose, a place in the composition. The fish tasted genuinely fresh, not fishy or tired. The vegetables retained snap, suggesting they’d been cut mere hours before service. Even the fried garnishes, so often stale and greasy, arrived crisp and greaseless, their golden exteriors still crackling audibly.
Sliced Barbecued Beijing Duck and Spanish Iberico Pork: Studies in Smoke and Lacquer
The second course arrived as a study in contrasts, two types of barbecued meat arranged on a rectangular platter with architectural precision. On the left, Beijing duck sliced into translucent slivers, each piece exhibiting the mahogany sheen of properly lacquered skin. On the right, Spanish Iberico pork loin, its surface glazed with honey to a burnished copper, marbled fat visible in intricate white webs through rosy flesh.
The duck commanded attention first. Lifting a slice with chopsticks, I held it to the light: the skin, translucent as stained glass, glowed amber-red, its surface mottled with darker caramelized patches where sugar had kissed flame. The skin shattered at first contact, yielding a percussive crack that resonated across the table. Beneath, the meat was surprisingly pale, almost ivory, its texture somewhere between silk and suede.
Flavour-wise, the duck walked a tightrope between richness and restraint. The skin tasted of star anise, five-spice, and wood smoke, sweet but not cloying, smoky but not aggressive. Fat had rendered almost completely, leaving only flavour without grease. The meat beneath provided a gentle, almost neutral counterpoint, absorbing the skin’s intensity while contributing its own delicate gaminess. Accompanied by paper-thin cucumber batons and scallion brushes, the dish allowed for construction of perfect bites: a sliver of duck, a shred of scallion, a strip of cucumber, all bundled and dipped in hoisin sauce that added molasses-dark sweetness and fermented funk.
The Iberico pork offered a different pleasure entirely. Where the duck was delicate and refined, the pork was bold and unapologetic. Each slice glistened with honey glaze, the surface caramelized to near-darkness in places, creating textural contrast between crispy edges and tender interior. The meat itself was extraordinary: deeply marbled, almost buttery in richness, tasting unmistakably of acorns and Spanish pastures.
Biting through yielded a sequence of sensations: first the snap of glazed surface, honey-sweet and lightly charred; then the giving of fat, which melted instantly, coating the mouth in luxurious richness; finally the meat itself, pink and yielding, tasting simultaneously sweet, savoury, and faintly nutty. The honey glaze, infused with five-spice and what tasted like Shaoxing wine, added complexity without overwhelming the pork’s inherent excellence. If I had one criticism, it would be that the sweetness bordered on excessive, particularly toward the fattier end slices, where sugar and pork fat together created an almost cloying richness.
Wok-Fried Prawns, Scallops, Mushrooms, and Greens: The Art of Wok Hei
The third course announced its arrival before it reached the table, trailing a cloud of smoke-tinged aroma that spoke of searing heat and rapid cooking. Presented in a shallow white bowl, the dish was a landscape of contrasts: coral-pink prawns curved like question marks, ivory scallops seared to golden crusts, charcoal-coloured shiitake caps, jade bok choy leaves still glistening with moisture, all bathed in a translucent sauce that caught light like liquid crystal.
The prawns dominated visually and texturally. Each one had been butterflied before cooking, revealing the moist white flesh beneath shells that had taken on a vermilion intensity during their brief encounter with the wok’s fierce heat. Biting through one required gentle pressure: the shell resisted momentarily before yielding, the flesh beneath offering that characteristic prawn snap, firm but not rubbery, releasing sweet brine tinged with garlic, ginger, and the ineffable essence the Cantonese call ‘wok hei’—breath of the wok.
The scallops told a different story. Seared on one side to achieve a golden-brown crust while leaving the interior barely cooked, they provided a textural journey from crispy exterior to yielding, almost creamy centre. Each scallop tasted profoundly of the sea, clean and sweet, enhanced rather than masked by the subtle aromatics in the sauce. The sear had caramelized their natural sugars, adding a toasted, nutty dimension that complemented the oceanic sweetness.
The mushrooms served as earthy counterweight to the seafood’s marine brightness. Thick shiitake caps, seared until their surfaces developed a light char, contributed deep umami and a texture like tender steak. The greens—bok choy and what appeared to be Chinese broccoli—retained vibrant colour and crisp-tender bite, their stems still offering resistance, their leaves wilted just enough to be tender without losing structure. They provided necessary freshness and a slight bitterness that cut through the dish’s richness.
The sauce deserved special mention. Light and glossy rather than thick and gloopy, it tasted primarily of superior chicken stock reduced to concentrate its essence, sharpened with Shaoxing wine, enlivened with fresh ginger, and finished with a whisper of white pepper that bloomed at the back of the throat. It coated ingredients without drowning them, adding cohesion without obscuring individual flavours. This restraint marked the difference between competent cooking and masterful execution.
A Study in Texture and Technique
What distinguished this meal from competent to exceptional was the kitchen’s mastery of texture. Each course presented multiple textural elements in careful balance: the yusheng juxtaposed silken fish against crunchy vegetables and crackling wonton skin; the barbecued meats contrasted crispy, lacquered exteriors with tender, yielding interiors; the wok-fried seafood combined the snap of prawn with the cream of scallop and the resistance of barely-wilted greens.
Temperature played an equally crucial role. Nothing arrived lukewarm. The barbecued meats came at room temperature, as they should, allowing fats to remain soft and flavours to bloom. The wok-fried dish arrived almost too hot to eat, steam still rising from the bowl, the ingredients radiating heat that spoke of immediate cooking and swift service. Even the yusheng, despite its raw components, included warm elements—the fried wonton strips still crackling—that created pleasant temperature contrasts.
The progression of the meal demonstrated thoughtful orchestration. We moved from cold to room temperature to hot, from delicate to rich to clean-flavoured, from ceremonial tossing to refined knife work to rustic wok cooking. Each course prepared the palate for the next, building complexity without overwhelming, allowing rest between intensity.
Colour, Composition, and the Visual Feast
Chinese cuisine has always understood that we eat first with our eyes, and Hai Tien Lo’s kitchen embraces this principle with artistic seriousness. The colour palette across courses spanned the spectrum: coral and crimson from prawns and salmon, jade and emerald from vegetables, ivory and cream from scallops and duck meat, mahogany and copper from glazed meats, charcoal and obsidian from shiitake mushrooms.
Plating followed classical Cantonese principles: white plates to showcase ingredients, minimal garnish to avoid clutter, arrangements that suggested abundance without creating chaos. The yusheng spread outward in radial symmetry, a mandala of ingredients inviting destruction. The barbecued meats lay in parallel rows, geometric precision suggesting order and refinement. The wok-fried dish embraced controlled disorder, ingredients tumbled together yet each element visible and distinct.
What impressed was the natural beauty of ingredients themselves. Nothing relied on artificial colouring or excessive manipulation. The salmon’s pink came from its flesh, not dye. The vegetables’ green derived from chlorophyll, vibrant because they’d been cooked properly, not shocked in ice water or treated with chemicals. The brown of roasted meats resulted from Maillard reactions and caramelization, honest colours born of heat and time.
Service: The Invisible Choreography
Service at Hai Tien Lo operates on principles of anticipation and discretion. Our server appeared precisely when needed, vanished when attention became intrusive. Tea cups remained perpetually half-full, refilled by hands that moved so smoothly the eye barely registered the action. Plates arrived and departed in coordinated waves, timed to conversation’s natural pauses rather than imposed by kitchen convenience.
Knowledge was comprehensive but deployed judiciously. When asked about specific dishes, our server provided detailed information about sourcing, preparation, and optimal serving temperature. When left to our own devices, she retreated to the margins, present but unobtrusive. This balance between attentiveness and restraint marked professional service of the highest order.
The pacing deserves particular praise. Courses arrived neither rushed nor languorous, allowing adequate time to appreciate each dish without creating awkward gaps where conversation faltered and attention wandered. The entire meal unfolded over two hours, long enough to feel leisurely, short enough to maintain momentum. This timing spoke to experience and careful management, ensuring that back-of-house execution aligned with front-of-house flow.
Conclusion: Heritage Honoured, Excellence Executed
At $168++ per person for the Fortune Blessing Menu, Hai Tien Lo positions itself in the mid-to-upper tier of Singapore’s Chinese New Year offerings. The price feels justified by ingredient quality, technical execution, and the overall experience. You’re not merely purchasing food; you’re buying into an evening of refinement, a space where tradition meets contemporary polish, where celebration feels elevated rather than merely festive.
What resonates most deeply is the kitchen’s respect for Cantonese culinary heritage paired with willingness to embrace premium ingredients and modern technique. The Beijing duck honoured tradition while showcasing impeccable execution. The Iberico pork brought Spanish luxury into conversation with Chinese flavour profiles. The wok-fried seafood demonstrated that fundamental techniques, when executed with precision and quality ingredients, need no gimmickry to impress.
Small quibbles existed: the honey glaze on the pork occasionally veered toward excessive sweetness; the yusheng, while beautiful, didn’t transcend the category in ways that some contemporary interpretations attempt. But these are minor criticisms in a meal that otherwise demonstrated consistent excellence across multiple courses and disciplines.
For families seeking a reunion dinner that balances traditional expectations with sophisticated execution, Hai Tien Lo delivers. The ambience flatters without overwhelming, the service attends without intruding, and the food honours heritage while showcasing ingredients and technique worthy of the occasion. In a city crowded with options for Chinese New Year dining, Hai Tien Lo earns its reputation not through innovation or shock value, but through the patient, meticulous pursuit of excellence in fundamentals—a philosophy as Chinese as the festival itself.