DELIGHTED CUSTOMER: Sandra Tang, a regular customer, is pleasantly surprised by the quality, price and significance of taking Lui Cha on the seventh day of Chinese New Year.
KUCHING: The norm in the food business here is that when demand rises, the quality of the food sold will nosedive while its price soar.
Hence, it was a pleasant surprise that Lui Cha seller Kong Siew Kee was an exception to this ridiculous ‘rule’.
She did not compromise on the quality of her Lui Cha nor its price even though the queue was easily an hour long yesterday.
Kong prepared 1,500 sets of Lui Cha yesterday as it is a typical dish of Hakka families on the seventh day of Chinese New Year.
On normal days, she sold the Lui Cha for between RM4.50 and RM5.00, depending on the portion ordered.
To make things easy in view of the big crowd, she set a one-for-all price of RM5 per set yesterday, without compromising on the portion size.
Lui Cha, sometimes referred to as ground tea or thunder tea, is a concoction of nuts, sesame seeds, tea, mint, potato leaves grounded together with other ingredients into a paste before being mixed with water or
soup.
It is served with rice and a generous portion of stir fried vegetables, tofu and peanuts, all diced into tiny morsels.
Kong has been selling Lui Cha at Big Mouth Coffeeshop in Jalan Dogan here for the past five years after moving from Miri – where she was a vegetables distributor and farmer.
HAPPY COOKS: Kong (right) and her assistant were kept extremely busy yesterday.
She told thesundaypost that 1,500 sets of Lui Cha needed 200 kg of vegetables.
“There are seven types of vegetables. The most important is leek. Leek in Mandarin is ‘Xuan’, which has a similar sound as the Mandarin word for ‘count’.
“Hence, by having Lui Cha on the seventh day of Chinese New Year, one can expect to have money to count all year round,” she chuckled.
The seventh day of Chinese New Year is also called ‘Everybody’s Day’ (ren-ri).
Among the huge crowd clamoring for Kong’s Lui Cha yesterday were two personalities from Kuching Video Drama Association and Huayi Studio, namely producer Chiew Ta Hua and videographer cum director Chai Kui Hua.
The duo is producing a video on Lui Cha to promote the cultures and traditions of Kuchingites.
“We hope to introduce our city to the world. Our latest video on the Sako, the python, has over 5,000 hits after we uploaded it on youtube for five days,” said Chiew proudly.
The 9-minute video of Sako spending Chinese New Year with its owner, the Phang family, can be viewed at youtube.com/watch?v=3sYY4JrScHk, together with other videos uploaded by Huayi Studio.
Chiew said the Lui Cha scenes which they filmed yesterday would be uploaded soon.