If Greenhills is Chinatown II, the five-star hotels in Makati have just made their city an extension of the extension without renaming it Chinatown III.

Well into the last quarter of the Year of the Ox, I found myself in the middle of a Chinois celebration at the lobby of the Dusit Thani which, as the reader knows, is not a Chinese- but Thai-owned hotel. A dragon dance was going on – you know, the kind that greets the Chinese Lunar New Year in the loudest, brightest primary colors -- accompanied by the obligatory crash of cymbals and bang of drums. An official of the Chinese embassy led other guests into the coffeeshop for lunch to partake of the hotel’s Canton Food Festival.

A feast of food in the middle of the “month of hungry ghosts” weeks before the Mid-Autumn Festival? Only in Makati, I thought. But when GM Prateek Kumar said that Chinese families make up 75 percent of the Sunday buffet crowd – at 400 PAX the busiest in Makati during the lunch hour – everything made sense. Mr. Kumar added, “We’re going to expand the Chinese section to accommodate lovers of Chinese cuisine.”

Chinese people don’t tire of Chinese cuisine, even if they eat it three times a day 365 days of the year. Four times, if you add tea time. Precisely the theme of Makati Shangri-la’s “Tea and Mooncakes.”

Not content with presenting five different flavors of the sweet brown cakes whose origins are the stuff of myth, legend and history, the hotel brought in a team of Chinese acrobats borrowed from Pagcor’s Wanders show to add thrills to the frills of sipping tea from teacups of bone china on the first day of the festival.

Unless it rains on the night of Oct. 3, the full moon will add luster to another hotel’s chinoiserie scene -- Mandarin Oriental capping the season of mooncakes with music, mythic memories of moon maidens, all highlighted by a dice game for families and groups of friends to play at dinner time. Among the clannish Chinese, hedonism looks and feels better when it’s shared and multiplied.