Which celebratory dish is your favorite?

An integral part of Asian culture is food: the signature bold flavors of spicy, sweet, and savory in cuisine, the wide variety of regional specialties, and the usage of mealtime to bond with family. During Lunar New Year, Asians eat several staple dishes with hidden meanings ensure an auspicious start to the year.

Junior Jason Purkey’s favorite dish is dumplings with pork and cabbage filling.

“We always have dumplings,” Purkey said. “My grandparents are in the area around this time, and they make hand-wrapped dumplings, which are especially good.”

Shay also loves eating dumplings for Lunar New Year. According to Shay, dumplings and tang yuan — a chewy, ball-shaped dessert made from glutinous rice and filled with black sesame — are a more prominent staple in Northern China and hold significance to the holiday’s emphasis on family.

“For dumplings [and] tang yuan, they will both mean 团圆 (tuan yuan) [meaning reunion],” Shay said. “Since it has filling inside, it will mean having a family together.”

Chen’s Lunar New Year’s Eve dinner strays from the traditional Chinese dinner and instead honors his Burmese side and the multiculturality of the United States.

“The biggest difference [in celebrating] from traditional Chinese is the meal before we celebrate; the big dinner,” Chen said. “We had goat curry. That’s like more Indian if anything else.”

But on the day of Lunar New Year, Chen ate more traditional dishes. 

“On the day of, we had the traditional stuff, like nian gao and a whole fish,” Chen said.