Celebrating the Chinese New Year

Xin Nian Kuai Le! Kung Hei Fat Choi! That means happy New Year in Mandarin. So Chinese New Year is one of the best holidays. In fact, it is the best Chinese holiday one can ever experience. It is like thanks giving in Christmas put together. Fifteen days of festivities and a lot of those festivities are centered around eating. The biggest one happens actually the day before Chinese new year, Chinese new year eve and that is when the family has a huge reunion dinner. And it is basically humongous feast where you eat amazing foods, fish and chicken, a lot of the foods that we tend to eat during Chinese new year, it symbolizes good luck and wealth and prosperity and it is really yummy.

A lot of the best Chinese New Year experiences that I have had in recent memory was actually this past Chinese new year. I went to dinner with friends at congee village on Balory. This Chinese restaurant is amazing, you do not have to go there during Chinese New Year, they have good food all the time. We have to have a long way because this popular restaurant was just ridiculously busy on Chinese New Year and we had to join tables with another couple who we have to form our big table. They did not see smaller tables of two in three. So we sat around with a bunch of strangers in this large circular table and dishes upon dishes of food came out. One of my favorites was – instead of a pecking dove, they came up with pecking chicken but it was pretty fantastic. This is a place where you just have to go in with the huge appetite. Do not come in with the full stomach because you will regret it.

Here are some of the foods we ate, we ate pecking chicken and it was served whole because it symbolizes family togetherness. We have lots of noodles and you have to be sure that they are not cut because if you cut them, it is bad luck. We had spring rolls because they symbolize wealth and also to their resemblance of the gold bars. Things that are also Chinese New Year type foods symbolizing luck is oranges because in Chinese, the words for orange also means luck. We have fish because in Chinese the word for fish sounds like wishing abundance. So as you can see, all these new year type foods are chosen specifically because the sound of the word represents health and prosperity and also they are really good to eat.


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