Chinese New Year at Hainan House
Southern Chinese Home-Style Cooking for the Year of the Fire Horse.
To mark Chinese New Year 2026, Hainan House will introduce a limited series of Southern Chinese specials rooted in symbolism, balance, and regional tradition. Running from 13 February to 3 March 2026, culminating in the Lantern Festival on 3 March, the menu reflects Hainan House’s thoughtful, home-style approach to celebration.
Chinese New Year itself falls on Tuesday 17 February 2026, with the special dishes available alongside the restaurant’s seasonal à la carte menu, allowing guests to shape their own celebratory meal.
Hainan House
Hainan House is an independent, female-owned, Chinese-owned restaurant on Upper Street in Islington, focused on Southern Chinese home-style cooking defined by balance, clarity, and craft. Founded by Sunny (Cenlang) Wu, the restaurant reflects a personal understanding of food shaped by lived experience rather than a single regional tradition.
Sunny grew up across multiple regions, including Hainan and Shanghai, with family heritage extending to Hubei and Jiangxi. This mix of influences informs a menu built on warmth, restraint, and everyday flavour, where familiar dishes are reinterpreted with sincerity and care.
Traditional techniques such as braising, steaming, poaching, and wok-frying underpin the kitchen’s approach, allowing ingredients to remain clear and composed. The à la carte menu evolves throughout the year with seasonal specials and is anchored by several signature dishes, including Hainan House’s delicately poached Hainan-style corn-fed chicken, served with fragrant rice and balanced sauces. Weekday lunches from Monday to Friday also feature comforting staples such as the house-made chicken and prawn wonton soup.
Hainan House opened its permanent Upper Street site in September 2023, following a series of successful pop-ups across London, including at Carousel. The restaurant has 36 covers across two floors, creating an intimate, neighbourhood-focused dining experience.
Designed by Gordon Young Architects, the interior was conceived to reflect the clarity and balance of the food itself. Natural materials such as stone, clay and timber create a tactile, grounded environment, while a palette inspired by Hainan — island greens, warm terracotta tones, soft sand shades, and honeyed wood — establishes a sense of familiarity that feels instinctive rather than defined. Counter seating sits alongside tables and chairs, with textured tiles, herringbone timber flooring and bespoke joinery contributing to a calm, quietly distinctive atmosphere.
As Sunny explains: “Hainan House comes from many different places. The food is shaped by how I understand home, through memory, balance, and everyday meals. We focus on warmth and clarity, bringing familiar dishes to life with sincerity and care, so they feel comforting without being heavy, and fresh without feeling performative.”
Chinese New Year Specials: Year of the Fire Horse
In Chinese Feng Shui culture, 2026 is known as the Bingwu Year, representing the Fire Horse, a symbol of vitality, movement, and resilience. Hainan House’s Chinese New Year specials interpret these themes through a small selection of specials rooted in Southern Chinese tradition.
Highlights include King Prawns presented in two ways. Garlic Steamed King Prawns are gently steamed and infused with aromatic garlic, light soy, spring onion, and chilli, while a second preparation symbolises moving forward side by side as the New Year begins. Drunken Prawns Claypot is simmered with traditional Chinese herbal ingredients including jade bamboo, codonopsis, angelica, goji berries and cordyceps flower, enriched with premium Chinese rice wine to create a warming, nourishing dish.
Fried Golden Pomfret with Spicy Sour Sauce brings brightness and light heat to the table, with fish traditionally symbolising abundance and surplus for the year ahead. Pickled Mustard Duck Soup, gently sour and delicately spiced, offers clarity and calm, providing balance against the strong fire energy of the year.
For dessert, Hainan House introduces a Chinese New Year special edition of Red Bua (红气养人). The glutinous rice skin is naturally coloured with red rice yeast, symbolising good fortune and vitality, and filled with a blend of desiccated coconut, brown sugar, peanut, and white sesame. Soft, nutty, and gently sweet, Red Bua celebrates renewal, nourishment and the quiet strength of tradition carried into the New Year.
All Chinese New Year dishes will be available as special dishes, ordered alongside the seasonal à la carte menu, allowing guests to choose a celebratory feast tailored to their taste.
Hainan House
88 Upper Street, Islington, London N1 0NP
https://www.hainanhouse.co.uk/
