An Illustrated Guide to Lunar New Year Dishes

Frequently prepared for Seollal (Korean Lunar New Year) and Chuseok (a Mid-Autumn Festival), this dish appears on the table for extra special feasts because it takes a relatively long time to prepare. Ribs become tender and sticky from a long braise in soy sauce, mirin, garlic, ginger and Asian pear. It’s cooked with a mix of vegetables like carrots, radish, mushrooms and jujubes (Korean red dates) then served with rice and garnished with chestnuts or ginkgo nuts.

Michelle Lee of Kimchi Korea House in Toronto has fond memories of galbi jjim even though she didn’t have her first taste until her twenties. “I grew up in a remote village in South Korea, and we rarely got to eat beef because it was considered a luxury—‘a dish fit for royalty.’ So the first few holidays where galbi jjim was on the table were quite special for me. It’s not a dish you make just for yourself; it’s meant to be shared on a celebratory occasion,” says Lee.

The thing with turnip cake is it’s not made with turnips and it’s not a cake, at least in the traditional Western sense. It’s a savoury and dense steamed “cake” served year-round and considered an auspicious food during the New Year. The real star is the grated Chinese radish (also known as Japanese daikon), which gets mixed with rice flour to create a batter accented with umami-packed ingredients like preserved Chinese sausage, shiitake mushrooms and dried seafood.

Braden Chong, head chef at MIMI Chinese and a partner at Sunnys Chinese, says, “When you bite into turnip cake, you have the crispy dried shrimp, next to the sweet and salty Chinese sausage and the gooey radish; it’s all unified by the chewy rice cake.” Chong has a modernized off-menu version (order it and feel like a true insider). It’s inspired by the Singapore-style turnip cake with XO sauce he orders at Toronto restaurants House of Gourmet and Congee Queen. 

Though rice cake soup—with or without dumplings—is eaten throughout the year, it holds special significance during Seollal (the Korean Lunar New Year festivities), when the rice cake is considered a symbol of longevity and luck, and when that cake is sliced into coins representing wealth and prosperity.

Chef Antonio Park of AP Restaurants in Toronto and Park in Montreal, fondly recalls making this dish with his mother and grandparents, savouring the beef-based soup with mandu (dumplings) made of beef, yam noodles and kimchi. It’s a dish full of tradition for Park, who says, “This is something I hold as a dear memory from childhood; it also brought me closer to my Korean heritage and culture.” 

This colourful and refreshing dish is a popular New Year tradition in Singapore and Malaysia with roots in China. Also known as lo hei, which translates to “tossing upward,” it refers to the tossing up of good fortune and prosperity. Armed with chopsticks, guests stand around a large platter of raw fish and other ingredients. Everyone takes part in tossing everything together. The fish symbolizes abundance, the citrus represents luck, golden crackers symbolize wealth, as do the crushed peanuts, which resemble sprinkling gold for extra prosperity.

Jeanne Chai and David Burga offer yusheng as a special Lunar New Year menu item at their cheese shop and Singaporean cafe, Kiss My Pans in Toronto. “We nominate someone to ‘bless’ the dish by calling out phrases that correspond to ingredients while adding them,” explains Chai. “Everyone cheers, ‘huat ah,’ continuously, which means ‘prosperity to all’ and begins to toss the yusheng. It is believed that the higher you toss, the more prosperous you’ll be. It is quite common for us to find bits of yusheng on our ceiling, floor, hair and clothes after!” 

Made with glutinous rice flour, filled with a sweet paste (often lotus seed, red bean or black sesame filling), rolled in sesame seeds, then fried until crisp, these chewy-on-the-inside balls are ubiquitous at dim sum, and they are a lucky dessert to consume during Lunar New Year celebrations. In Chinese culture, round foods represent togetherness and wholeness, and the golden colour of jian dui represents—you guessed it—gold and good fortune. And since they expand when deep-fried, they also symbolize growth in your fortune.

Growing up with both Vietnamese and Chinese cuisine, Steven Tran, the pastry chef at the Shangri-La Hotel in Toronto, has created chocolate truffles inspired by the jian dui of his childhood and has big plans for a special Lunar New Year afternoon tea at the hotel in February. To satisfy his cravings when there’s no special occasion to enjoy his mom’s homemade sesame balls, Tran pops into the Toronto Chinatown staple HK Island Bakery. 

Imagine if every time you ate a dumpling, you got richer. It can’t hurt to try. Usually filled with meat—and/or vegetables—these dough-wrapped morsels are a very common Chinese food, but during the New Year, it’s said to be  particularly lucky to consume them.

Chef Li Wang, co-founder of Ma Chinese Cuisine in St. Catharines, offers several types of dumplings at the restaurant. Wang shares, “It’s a must to eat dumplings in the northern regions. I come from the north in Xi’an, so I have a stronger affection for dumplings. The pronunciation of ‘jiaozi’ sounds like ‘midnight of the New Year,’ so it carries the meaning of the transition between the old and the new years,” explains Wang. “The belief is the more dumplings you eat during New Year celebrations, the more wealth you’ll accumulate that year.”

What sets Indonesian kue lapis legit layer cake apart from other cakes are both its ingredients and its cooking method. This cake is comprised of at least 18 rich layers made from butter, egg yolks (lots of them), spices and sugar and it’s baked in a specific broiler oven. It’s a combination of European baking methods and Indonesian spices. It looks like a German Baumkuchen, but with a buttery, rich flavour and a dense yet soft texture. It’s like eating a soft, pillowy shortbread cookie in a cake form. Linda says, “Since I grew up in Jakarta, Chinese New Year festivities are a fusion of Chinese and Indonesian cultures. This cake symbolizes good luck, a long life and prosperity, therefore, the more layers you have on your cake, the more luck and prosperity you will have.”

The Vietnamese glutinous rice cake bánh tét is traditionally savoury and filled with mung beans and pork belly. You can pan-fry them and enjoy with fish sauce and pickled leeks. It’s a seemingly simple dish that actually requires an enormous amount of patience and skill. Duong says, “Bánh tét reminds me of my grandma. We would wipe down the banana leaves together, and I’d watch as she topped each with just the right amount of filling before bundling everything up. I remember them spending hours upright in a tall  stockpot, simmering away and perfuming the entire apartment. The best part was waking up the next morning knowing they were ready to be eaten.”

Sea cucumber is a pricey item, symbolizing wealth. It absorbs the flavours in which you braise it—chicken stock fortified with charred onion, ginger, garlic and dried scallops—for a rich soup that sticks to your lips because of the gelatinous nature of everything combined. Chen says, “When I was growing up in a small Chinatown in Kolkata, India, Lunar New Year was a big deal for us. It was a week filled with festivities, card games, immense amounts of food and red envelopes of money, and as a kid you got to wear new outfits. The whole town would be lit up! My ancestors are from Moyan, China, and this recipe was passed down from them. My mum makes this dish during Lunar New Year. Whenever we gather to eat this dish, I feel a little bit closer to my roots.”