Mooncakes packed with endless variety of imagination, innovation
A line of hungry shoppers wait to get mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival outside Sunya Cantonese Restaurant at Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall.
With Mid-Autumn Festival just around the corner, mooncake fever once again grips the nation.
This year Mid-Autumn Festival falls on September 24.
It is a time for traditions, of course, but the spirit of the times is innovation, trying something new. Some of the city’s time-honored restaurants and food stores have been adding some new pizzazz to the ancient treat.
At Sunya Cantonese Restaurant at Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall, endless queues of customers swelter under the sun and are soaked by the rain in the long wait — as much as an hour — for Sunya’s signature handmade pork mooncakes. Sunya, making and selling mooncake for over 90 years, has three new flavors on the menu this year.
Among them, one filled with salty cheese and bacon has been wowing young gourmands. So popular is it that 10,000 of them are passing across the counter every day.
“I don’t like traditional mooncakes with lotus seed or red bean paste because they are too sweet,” said Amy Liu, a tourist in her 20s from Hangzhou. “Salty ones are much better and I love bacon.”
At Zhen Laodafang Store a frenzied crowd grab pork mooncakes at the same tourist walking street.
Last year’s hottest craze was mooncake with yanduxian filling. Yanduxian is a typical Shanghai soup with pork and bamboo shoots, and the mooncake version was no one-hit wonder as it is still selling well this year.
Shanghai First Food Store opposite Sunya has shrimp mooncakes, while Central Hotel Shanghai, the city’s best-known crab restaurant, is serving barbecued pork and crab meat mooncakes as their new offering.
There is also a trend for cakes branded with figures from popular culture such as the Taiko Drum Master. There are even Disney varieties.
New crazy flavors might be popular among young people, but older customers hold fast to traditional values and traditional tastes.
“I prefer the flavors I have known for my whole life, like red bean paste or wuren (five different nuts including peanuts and walnuts). I have been eating them for so many years,” said 65-year-old Shanghai resident Tao Xiujuan.
“The old tastes are so familiar to me, and I find new flavors strange. I don’t even want to try them,” she said. “I have baked traditional mooncakes for my family.”
The price of the cakes is about the same as last year. A big drop in sugar prices has offset rises in the cost of packaging, the Shanghai Sugar Food Association said.
Last year, sales reached a peak because the festival fell during the October 1 National Day holiday, but the association estimates that sales will be just as good this year.
Are you excited to try some of the new flavors, or are you a traditionalist and going to stick with what you know best?
