By AUDRA ANG

Picture this: Lobster cooked eight ways. Sharks' fin bathed in a rich brown sauce. Stewed bird's nest sweetened with apricots. Abalone braised until tender.
Now, the bill: 198,000 yuan (US$24,500).
The Lao Zhengxing restaurant in the eastern city of Hangzhou has taken culinary decadence to new heights with its Chinese New Year banquet menu. It's a mix of exorbitantly priced ingredients and flashy cooking, topped off with a big dash of self-promotion.
"Our boss loves good food and has served it for more than 40 years," said the manager, surnamed Li.
"But I don't deny we are also aiming to get publicity."
Just a few years ago, Chinese spent the Lunar New Year - their most celebrated holiday - cooking feasts at home. But now, increasingly wealthy and busy, they are splurging on elaborate restaurant banquets.
"It is the time for families to gather," said Bian Jiang, secretary-general of the China Cuisine Association. "People expect and enjoy higher standards of food, teas, wines and services during the New Year."
The rush to book a table now starts as early as December and meals range from hundreds to tens of thousands of yuan.
"People are getting lazier and they have less time to cook," said Liu Jiang, a 43-year-old Beijing homemaker who has reserved a table for 12 at a roast duck restaurant today, the eve of the Spring Festival.
Dishes at a New Year's Eve reunion dinner are full of symbolic meaning: Noodles represent longevity, fish for wealth and round foods, like meat balls, emphasize togetherness. The menu usually has one or two high-priced delicacies like abalone or sharks' fin thrown in to make the occasion more memorable.
The Lao Zhengxing banquet features a soup with a hair-like black sea moss whose name in Mandarin sounds the same as the phrase "get rich."
Among the other rarities offered - a "three-headed" Japanese abalone, which costs 20,000 yuan each and 50-year-old Pu'er tea from Yunnan.
So far, there's been one taker, a Hong Kong businessman.
Quan Ju De, a popular roast duck chain in Beijing, is attracting more takers, with its most-expensive holiday menu, which feeds 10 for 8,666 yuan, a play on numbers considered lucky.
And is it unlucky to eat dog in the Year of the Dog?
Not in the northeastern province of Jilin. "The people of Jilin have the tradition of eating dog in winter since dog meat is good for the health," said a restaurant worker at Chaoxian Restaurant in Jilin city.
"No one has ever complained about eating dogs in the Year of the Dog," he said. "If so, we cannot eat pigs next year, right?"