50 Recipes for a Lunar New Year Celebration

Lunar New Year, also called Spring Festival, is a feast-filled holiday celebrated by many countries and cultures. In its several iterations, including Chinese, Korean (Seollal), Vietnamese (Tết) and more, it’s a time for friends and families to gather, eat and wish for a prosperous new year. The foods you’ll find on the table during this festive season are deeply symbolic, meant to celebrate togetherness and signify wealth and good fortune.

The dishes here range from savory preparations like noodles, dumplings and whole fish to desserts—like these tangyuan (or, chewy rice balls). Tangyuan are traditionally eaten as a dessert during the family reunion dinner on Chinese New Year's Eve. Each bowl of tangyuan symbolizes unity; and the smoothness of each ball represents how smooth the family's year will be. The rice balls have a soft and slightly bouncy texture and a sweet surprise in the center. The traditional filling for tangyuan is made with black sesame seeds, but we chose a less typical version—a sweet, nutty and luscious peanut filling.

While this Korean rice cake soup is a popular comfort food year-round, it’s a must-have on Seollal. The rice cakes themselves encapsulate some of the holiday’s major themes: The hope for vitality, goodness and prosperity in the new year. The white color of the cakes signifies longevity and purity, and they are sliced into disc-like shapes that resemble Korea’s old coin currency, symbolizing wealth in the new year. The broth for tteokguk is typically beef-based, with some versions using marrow bones and some, like this recipe, using brisket. The dish is best served right away as the rice cakes can lose their chewy goodness (or even disintegrate) if left in the broth too long.

For the Vietnamese diaspora, glutinous rice dumplings are the heart of Tết celebrations. People from Southern Vietnam know these rice dumplings as banh tét and shape them into cylinders; in the north, the cakes take on a rectangular shape and are called banh chưng. Banh chưng fillings vary from family to family, but the three most common ingredients are pork belly, mung beans and sweet rice — which meld together to create a delicious, tender dumpling. Assembling these banana-wrapped parcels is a multi-step process that, like many holiday foods, takes a little bit of advance preparation and time. But that’s all the more reason to gather family and friends into the kitchen to make them together. This recipe makes six banh chưng, but feel free to double (or quadruple) the quantity so you’ll have more than enough to keep for yourself, with plenty to gift all around.

Whole fish is a traditional part of Lunar New Year dinner tables, symbolizing abundance of food, wealth and luck for the new year. But this recipe can also be part of any special-occasion meal with its stunning presentation: a crispy whole fish topped with a tangle of greens — a mix of sliced scallions and fresh cilantro — bloomed upon serving with a scoop of the hot fry oil.