Kar Loong Yee can pinpoint the exact moment he fell in love with food. It was at age nine in Malaysia, where he grew up in a small village, watching his mum and grandmother cooking with charcoal in the family kitchen.

“In those days we didn’t have a gas stove, so I was wondering how the charcoal worked. From there I got interested in cooking, and I became a chef,” says Yee, who is now the chef de cuisine at Silks, the high-end Chinese restaurant at Crown Melbourne.

Yee helped to develop a special Lunar New Year menu at Silks, which draws on Chinese, Malaysian and other Asian traditions to underscore shared wishes for good luck and prosperity at the start of a new year. Often referred to as Chinese New Year, the Lunar New Year is a communal time of renewal in Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Tibetan and Mongolian cultures as well, with specific dishes often doubling as meaningful symbols for a family’s goals and wishes for the coming year.

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Other cultural traditions include costumed lion and dragon dances, elaborate fireworks and the gifting of red packets (hongbao) containing money from parents to children. “As children, we don’t sleep at all the night before,” Yee says. “We’re waiting for the parents to put out the red packets. We’re so excited that we can’t sleep. Very early in the morning, every house starts setting out fireworks – you can hear it in the streets.”

Yee still appreciates those traditions in Melbourne, from the daily lion dances at Crown around the holiday period to the organised annual celebrations in Chinatown. And the first day of the holiday period is always about the family reuniting with those members who no longer live at home, sharing a meal together that is only served around then.

“These are the dishes that bring us back to our childhood,” Yee says. “Many of them you can’t have on a normal day. They’re only for a special day.”

He cites Lou Sang, a Cantonese salmon and kingfish salad dish sourced from Malaysia for Silks’ Lunar New Year menu. It’s a dish designed for the holiday’s special “prosperity toss”. “We put it in the middle of the table and you have to toss it with the chopsticks as high as possible,” he says. “The higher you go, the more prosperity and wellness will come to you. That’s the belief.”

Similarly, the ingredient black moss (fat choy), a land-based algae, appears on the special menu and represents luck and wealth. Some dishes on the set menu and à la carte menu can be served year-round, like the slow-cooked pork knuckle with shitake and bean curd skin and the tossed snow crab with brandy and duck liver, but others are limited to the Lunar New Year.

That’s especially true of the Cantonese poon choi, a robust hot pot that’s so extravagant it requires a minimum of four guests to order it together. Combining tiger prawns, scallops, baby abalones, sea cucumber, fish maw, roast duck, pork belly, wild mushrooms and many other ingredients, it’s one of the most indulgent dishes available from the restaurant all year.

“Everything in that pot is very expensive,” says Yee. “It tastes amazing: so rich. You can’t have it on a normal day because it takes three days to prepare. Because it’s a lot of dry ingredients, we have to hydrate them again.”

Yee was one of five subjects interviewed for a new documentary short entitled Hear Melbourne Roar, made by Melbourne filmmaking duo Alicia and Archie. Themed around the Lunar Year New and the start of the Year of the Tiger, it showcases a diverse cross-section of Asian-Australian creatives, chefs and businesspeople sharing their positive expectations and highlighting the holiday’s importance throughout the city’s Asian community. It’s a companion to the duo’s earlier film about how Melbourne’s record lockdown affected the people behind the scenes of the local restaurant industry.

“It was very challenging for both employee and company,” says Yee. “I bought a lot of books and started to experiment at home. I started using a lot of Australian produce to implement in Chinese cuisine.”

Born in the Year of the Goat, Yee has always related strongly to that year’s character traits of modesty and kind-heartedness. But he is also invested in the promise of the oncoming Year of the Tiger, and all that it represents – including a return to strength.

“Very fierce. Strong and confident,” he says. “The years of the tiger are very powerful, compared to others. We’re hoping to get back to normal, like before.”

This article was produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Crown Melbourne. More here on Crown Melbourne’s Lunar New Year offering.