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Food holds special meaning on the Lunar New Year. Readers share their favorite dishes

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Food holds special meaning on the Lunar New Year. Readers share their favorite dishes

NPR readers share the dishes they love most for the Lunar New Year.

Jing Gao; Alvina Chu; Amy Fedun; Beth Rogers-Ho; Alice Young; Elsy MektrakarnNguyen; Sarah Low; Anh Therese McCauley


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Jing Gao; Alvina Chu; Amy Fedun; Beth Rogers-Ho; Alice Young; Elsy MektrakarnNguyen; Sarah Low; Anh Therese McCauley


NPR readers share the dishes they love most for the Lunar New Year.

Jing Gao; Alvina Chu; Amy Fedun; Beth Rogers-Ho; Alice Young; Elsy MektrakarnNguyen; Sarah Low; Anh Therese McCauley

More than a billion people worldwide will celebrate the Lunar New Year on Saturday as they usher in the Year of the Dragon. It’s called Tet in Vietnam, Tsagaan Sar in Mongolia and Seollal in Korea. Whether it’s celebrated in Asia or abroad, the annual holiday is a time for many to honor elders, spend time with family, reflect on the past year and wish for a lucky year ahead.

Candied coconut, or mut dua, is a common dish seen at Vietnamese New Year celebrations.

Suzanne Nuyen

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Candied coconut, or mut dua, is a common dish seen at Vietnamese New Year celebrations.

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Suzanne Nuyen

Like most holidays, a bountiful spread of food is essential to Lunar New Year festivities. In my Vietnamese household, rice cakes called banh chung and candied fruits called mut are as essential to the New Year as turkey and mashed potatoes are to Thanksgiving. Traditional foods vary across Asian cultures. Some have even evolved as Asian diaspora communities invite others to share in their traditions.

I wanted to know what dishes NPR readers couldn’t go without on the Lunar New Year. These were some of the dishes that stood out as favorites, plus one special recipe a reader created for her grandchildren.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity

Banh chung

Banh chung and banh tet are quintessential parts of a Vietnamese Lunar New Year meal.

Suzanne Nuyen

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Banh chung and banh tet are quintessential parts of a Vietnamese Lunar New Year meal.

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Suzanne Nuyen

Making banh chung involves a labor intensive process. Often, the entire family is roped in to help.

Suzanne Nuyen


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Making banh chung involves a labor intensive process. Often, the entire family is roped in to help.

Suzanne Nuyen

Vietnam’s quintessential Lunar New Year dish is a labor of love. Banana leaves are meticulously washed, then wrapped around sticky rice filled with pork belly and mung beans. The cakes are boiled for hours before they’re ready to eat. It often takes a whole family to make the dish.

For Yolanda Vo, the dish reminds her of her refugee parents, who brought their tradition to the U.S. nearly 50 years ago. Sahra Nguyen watches her mom make the “shockingly laborious” cakes every year. She wrote that she sees her mom’s love for her family in her dedication to making the dish. “I feel deeply grateful for the opportunity to enjoy each bite because I know it’s one of her biggest displays of love,” wrote Nguyen.

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Hot pot

Alvina Chu loves hot pot for the new year because “the meal gathers us around the pot to commune with each other and enjoy our favorite bites.”

Alvina Chu


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Alvina Chu loves hot pot for the new year because “the meal gathers us around the pot to commune with each other and enjoy our favorite bites.”

Alvina Chu

Amy Fedun’s special hot pot includes whole grilled or baked fish and lamb chops.

Amy Fedun


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Amy Fedun


Amy Fedun’s special hot pot includes whole grilled or baked fish and lamb chops.

Amy Fedun

There are endless varieties of Hot pot across Asia. It’s also known as Chinese fondue or huoguo in China. In Vietnam, it’s called lau. In Japan: shabu-shabu. All the dishes involve cooking meats, noodles and vegetables communally in a pot of broth.

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“It gathers the family around a single pot to linger and commune with each other,” Alvina Chu wrote. “Everyone gets to pick what they like — and the prep is no-stress for mom!”

Amy Fedun wrote that she loves a steamy pot on cold days. She tops her special hotpot with a whole grilled or baked fish, then stacks grilled lamb chops cut to look like bear paws on top of the fish. “There’s a [Mandarin] saying that literally goes, ‘you can’t have both fish and bear paw,’ meaning you have to make a choice between two desirable things,” wrote Fedun “Well, here at my new year’s table, you get to enjoy both.”

Fresh fruit

In Vietnam, a display of fresh fruit represents gratitude to your ancestors on the new year.

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In Vietnam, a display of fresh fruit represents gratitude to your ancestors on the new year.

Suzanne Nuyen

Anh Therese McCauley thinks durian is a “weird fruit,” but loves it on the Lunar New Year regardless.

Anh Therese McCauley

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Anh Therese McCauley thinks durian is a “weird fruit,” but loves it on the Lunar New Year regardless.

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Anh Therese McCauley

The highlight of Anh Therese McCauley’s Lunar New Year meals is when her mother brings out the durian fruit. It’s an acquired taste. Its smell has been described as similar to a gas leak. But many covet its custardy taste and texture, calling it “crème brûlée on a tree.” “It’s such a weird fruit, but we can claim it as ours in the Asian diaspora, and I can’t help but love that,” McCauley wrote.

Jessica Hoang’s Vietnamese fruit of choice is the mang cau, or custard apple. Her grandma always had it in her home during the new year. Her mother would tell her stories of growing up eating the fruit in Vietnam and using the seeds to play a marbles game. “My grandma was an intimidating woman — tough, cold and not afraid to be direct,” Hoang wrote. “But her way of showing she cared was giving us food and telling us to eat. In those moments, for a few minutes, a young me was able to be close to my grandma.”

Hainanese chicken

Elsy MektrakarnNguyen’s family always includes Hainan chicken rice as part of their Lunar New Year table.

Elsy MektrakarnNguyen


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Elsy MektrakarnNguyen’s family always includes Hainan chicken rice as part of their Lunar New Year table.

Elsy MektrakarnNguyen

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Elsy MektrakarnNguyen’s family has its roots in Hainan, China, just as this chicken and rice dish does. Hainanese migrants took the recipe with them when they migrated across Southeast Asia. The meal of poached chicken and garlic rice cooked in the chicken’s broth is now an iconic fixture in Singaporean street food.

MektrakarnNguyen’s family moved to Thailand before her mother was born. Though the new year, or Songkran, is celebrated there in April, her family continued to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Hainanese chicken, or khao man gai in Thai, was often part of the table of offerings to their ancestors.

“The garlic rice was precooked with LOTS of garlic and chicken fat,” she wrote. “My house would smell of garlic for days after cooking it. The smells of my childhood.”

Braised pork belly

Thit kho trung, or caramelized pork belly with eggs, is Kimberly Huynh’s favorite Lunar New Year dish. She loves how the meat falls apart after hours of braising.

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Thit kho trung, or caramelized pork belly with eggs, is Kimberly Huynh’s favorite Lunar New Year dish. She loves how the meat falls apart after hours of braising.

Suzanne Nuyen

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Like many of the dishes mentioned above, a version of braised pork belly appears on many Lunar New Year tables across Asia. In Vietnam, hard-boiled eggs are added to the dish called thịt kho trứng. Thịt kho paired with white rice is so comforting,” Kimberly Huynh wrote. “It braises for hours and it just falls apart when it’s ready to be eaten.”

Carrie Huang, from Taipei, Taiwan, enjoys a similar dish from Hangzhou, China called Dongpo pork. She wrote that the layers in the pork belly “represent seasons of the year and the good times and challenging times, similar to the rings inside the trunk of a tree showing the tough years and the good years.”

Jai

Sarah Low isn’t the biggest fan of jai, but she makes it because it reminds her of her culture and her late grandparents.

Sarah Low


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Sarah Low isn’t the biggest fan of jai, but she makes it because it reminds her of her culture and her late grandparents.

Sarah Low

Sarah Low wrote that she used to hate jai, also known as Buddha’s delight or lo han jai. Still, she makes this vegetarian dish every year to remember her late grandparents and the culture she grew up in. “It’s a dish that is so different than what I cook all year long,” she wrote. “It’s a great way to remember the past and be mindful of the present.”

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As for whether she still hates it? “I find I appreciate the flavors, but it’s never going to be my favorite,” Low wrote.

Rice cake soup

A view of Tteokguk during the Korean Food Foundation Luncheon at Bann on February 1, 2011 in New York City.

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A view of Tteokguk during the Korean Food Foundation Luncheon at Bann on February 1, 2011 in New York City.

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It’s not Korean New Year, or seollal, without this rice cake soup called tteokguk. The coin-shaped rice cakes are thought to bring prosperity and riches, and its white color symbolizes a fresh start to the New Year.

Myung Armstrong garnishes her tteokguk with seaweed and julliened egg omelette. She wrote that the warm, savory beef broth and soft, chewy rice cakes bring “very happy memories making it with my mother.”

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Dumplings

Mikayla Sanford’s makes Tibetan momos every year for the new year. Sometimes, her family can make hundreds of them.

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Mikayla Sanford’s makes Tibetan momos every year for the new year. Sometimes, her family can make hundreds of them.

Mikayla Sanford

Dumplings originated in Northern China and spread around the world. They are thought to bring fortune in the new year because they’re shaped like ancient Chinese money. Zhong dumplings, one of the most iconic street snacks of Chengdu, China, are a key part of Jing Gao’s Lunar New Year table.

Mikayla Sanford’s dumpling of choice are momos. They hail from Tibet, where the Lunar New Year is known as Losar. “Tibetan’s never had much flour or meat, so momos were always prepared for special occasions,” she wrote. “My family has been making them since I was a child. We even get together with huge steaming vats to make hundreds of momos during the new year.”

RECIPE: Alice Young’s “No Fuss Grandchildren’s Chinese Dumplings”

This recipe was provided by Alice Young.

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Alice Young’s “No Fuss Grandchildren’s Chinese Dumplings”

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Alice Young’s “No Fuss Grandchildren’s Chinese Dumplings”

Alice Young

Alice Young has a unique dumpling recipe that she calls “No Fuss Grandchildren’s Chinese Dumplings.” She spent decades as a law partner and wrote that she had to be “creative and quick” with her food. She created this recipe for her “young, blue-eyed and blonde grandchildren.” They live in North Carolina, where Chinese communities are scarce. To adapt, Young’s recipe uses ingredients that are easy to find and childproof.

Alice Young came up with her dumpling recipe using ingredients that are easy to find in North Carolina and steps that her grandchildren can follow along with.

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Alice Young came up with her dumpling recipe using ingredients that are easy to find in North Carolina and steps that her grandchildren can follow along with.

Alice Young

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Ingredients:

  • rotisserie or any cooked chicken or meat or sausage, or firm tofu, diced
  • chopped green onions or chives or cabbage, or a mix
  • mayonnaise or vegenaise
  • hoisin sauce
  • oyster sauce
  • sesame seed oil
  • wonton wrappers

Directions:

  1. In a medium-size bowl mix equal portions of chicken/meat/tofu and chopped greens. 
  2. Add mayonnaise, hoisin sauce, and a splash of oyster sauce and sesame oil until the mixture has the consistency of a sticky filling and tastes good to the sampling grandchild.
  3. Put a teaspoon of filling in a wonton wrap, lightly wet the edges of the wrap with water on your fingertips, and seal each dumpling in either a triangle or with a crimped edge, depending on the skill and interest of the grandchild.
  4. Optional- if the grandchild is forewarned and is not likely to swallow a small toy gold coin, sneak one into one of the dumplings as a lucky dumpling.
  5. Boil a pot of water and drop the finished dumplings in and cook for 6 minutes, until the dumpling wraps are cooked
  6. For fried dumplings. heat a pan with peanut or almond oil on medium heat, and fry the dumplings for 5 minutes until crispy on the bottom, add a splash of water and cover for 1-2 minutes until the water has evaporated and the dumpling wraps are cooked.
  7. Serve with soy sauce mixed with rice vinegar and sugar.

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‘Hellions’ author Julia Elliott wins $150K fiction prize

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‘Hellions’ author Julia Elliott wins 0K fiction prize

Author Julia Elliott won for her short story collection Hellions.

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Writer Julia Elliott has won this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her short story collection Hellions. The award honors work by women and nonbinary authors in the U.S. and Canada.

Elliott, who also authored the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch and the short story collection The Wilds, is known for blending elements of Southern gothic horror, surrealism and fairy tale. Hellions, published in 2025, includes stories set against backdrops like a plague-stricken medieval convent, a feminist art colony, and small Southern towns.

“This eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection takes no half-measures; every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls,” wrote the prize jury in a statement. “Here, human folly moves against a backdrop of horror and magic … But for all its wildness, there is tremendous control.”

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The prize, named after a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, awards $150,000 to one winner each year. Novels, short story collections, and graphic novels by women and nonbinary authors are eligible.

This year’s finalists included Quiara Alegría Hudes (The White Hot), Lee Lai (Cannon), Megha Majumdar (A Guardian and a Thief), and Sonya Walger (Lion). They will each receive $12,500.

The Carol Shields Prize went to writer Canisia Lubrin in 2025.

You can listen to actor Donna Lynne Champlin read Elliott’s story “Hellion” on the Death, Sex & Money podcast here.

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Video: The Fashion References in ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’

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Video: The Fashion References in ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’

new video loaded: The Fashion References in ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’

Cats: The Jellicle Ball” has received nine Tony nominations, including one for Qween Jean, the costume designer. Our chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, joins our chief theater critic Helen Shaw to talk with Qween Jean and to uncover some of the show’s hidden references.

By Helen Shaw, Vanessa Friedman, Léo Hamelin, Laura Salaberry and Sutton Raphael

June 2, 2026

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Inside the all-masc lesbian and translesbian revue electrifying L.A. nightlife

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Inside the all-masc lesbian and translesbian revue electrifying L.A. nightlife

At around 1 in the morning at the Sassafras Saloon in Hollywood, four masc lesbians in cowboy hats and chaps were dancing on top of the bar while bartenders attempted to continue making espresso martinis beneath them.

One performer crawled into the crowd and between the spread legs of an audience member, licking the air between their thighs. Another wrapped a belt around their girlfriend’s neck while thrusting against her to Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name.” The ravenous audience, almost entirely women, fluttered dollar bills all around, while easily filling the saloon’s 300-person capacity.

Across Los Angeles, countless strip clubs and revue shows were unfolding at that same hour, though none quite like this and likely few provoking this level of frenzy. The night had all the riotous energy of a scene from “Coyote Ugly,” with the choreographed masculinity of “Magic Mike.” Playing on the latter’s name, this was the doing of Magic Mascs, an all-masc lesbian and translesbian revue, by sapphics for sapphics.

Skye Valentinez, from left, Alexa Legend, Daddii Syd and King Captain are members of Magic Mascs, an all-masc lesbian and translesbian collective, that started in February.

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“Our idea was to give lesbians what men get all the time at a strip club, but instead of just sitting around and singing ‘Pink Pony Club,’ actually going wild,” said group founder Daddii Syd, a.k.a. Syd Latimore.

The performers, self-described “daddies” — Daddii Syd, Alexa Legend, Skye Valentinez and King Captain — formed Magic Mascs in February. The performance at the Saloon was their third overall, but the group has already become an institution within lesbian nightlife in Los Angeles. They will make their debut during a Pride Month performance on Friday at Womxn Pride’s rooftop party in downtown L.A.

The members come from professional dance backgrounds. King Captain entered dance school at age 12 and taught dance for nearly a decade. Daddii Syd has danced since childhood. Alexa Legend spent years go-go dancing across clubs in the city before joining the troupe. Skye Valentinez, the baby of the group — cherub-faced, smiling through braces — is the newest to performing, though she steps into it naturally, exhibiting the same living, breathing caricature of masculinity as the rest of them.

“No one’s trying to be cisgender,” King Captain makes clear. “We’re not trying to be the kind of men who are born into and fed by patriarchy,” Daddii Syd added. “We’re redefining masculinity.”

King Captain gets their underwear stuffed with dollar bills from the crowd.

King Captain gets their underwear stuffed with dollar bills from the crowd.

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Magic Mascs’ success follows a broader trend of lesbians confidently stepping into masculinity before hungry eyes. In the past year, performative masc competitions have appeared across the country, with lesbians — hair slicked back and carabiners dangling from their Carhartt jeans — showing off in front of leering crowds. Magic Mascs feels like a more professionalized version of that phenomenon, less tongue-in-cheek — just tongue.

“We always knew there was a huge hunger for this,” Daddii Syd said.

Their first performance, in San Diego, sold out fast.

“I knew right away we were onto something special,” Daddii Syd said.

Videos of the troupe traveled far across sapphics’ algorithms, especially clips of King Captain, whose devoted fan base — known collectively as “The Castle” — make arduous trips just to see them in the flesh. One fan drove more than 20 hours from Dallas to San Diego to see Magic Mascs. Another sent an edible fruit bouquet from Australia.

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Backstage, every gesture from the troupe was ultra-confident. Captain, wearing briefs stuffed with a sock full of rice, talked to me with a leg cocked on the footrest of my stool. Daddii Syd, Alexa Legend and Skye Valentinez stood pelvis-forward, hands behind their heads, flexing ropey muscles. They loved the camera, eyeing it like prey while tipping the brims of their cowboy hats. (“You guys are like the modern-day Beatles,” our photographer said.)

King Captain gets the Hollywood crowd into a frenzy during a recent show.

King Captain gets the Hollywood crowd into a frenzy during a recent show.

Everything in the show revolved around their hips. The performers rolled and glided before delivering sudden, mechanical thrusts powerful enough to rattle nearby glasses. Their bodies were taut with effort and exaggerated lust. Daddii Syd performed with her girlfriend Jamie in matching plaid, not leaving much to the imagination as they licked whipped cream off each other.

Alexa Legend, who described herself as shy offstage, eventually stripped down to nipple pasties and a cowboy hat, firing confetti from her crotch into the crowd. King Captain swerved their hips like a powerful mechanical bull. “Oh, Captain, my captain,” someone in the crowd said, hand pressed dramatically to her forehead.

They paid particular attention to a woman in a wheelchair in the crowd — typical of their performances — asking if they could sit on the wheelchair. They received keen consent. “That was, um, very nice,” she told me after, still a little lost for words.

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“We’re huge on consent,” Daddii Syd said. At the start of the show, they told the crowd to cross their arms in a Wakanda Forever pose if they didn’t wish to be touched. They checked in constantly while moving through the crowd, leaning close to ask questions like, “Is this OK?” and “Anywhere you don’t like to be touched?”

Captain learned these habits through work in intimacy coordination and under the mentorship of Tonia Sina, among the first professional intimacy coordinators in Hollywood. That ethos of care extended beyond their interactions with the audience and into the way they interacted with one another offstage.

Performer King Captain of Magic Mascs take a tip from a fan.

“We want everyone in the crowd to feel gorgeous,” King Captain said before the recent show at Sassafras Saloon in Hollywood.

Performer King Captain, left, and Lauren Henson, a stage kitten for the group, perform together on the bar.

King Captain, left, and Lauren Henson, a stage kitten for the Magic Mascs, perform together on the bar.

Forming a sanctuary for themselves was just as important to the troupe as emboldening others’ desire. “It’s hard to find other masc friends,” Daddii Syd said. “Everybody’s weirdly competitive and trying to sabotage each other.” King Captain agreed, asking: “Why can’t we all be daddies at the same time?”

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Daddii Syd and King Captain, who are both in their 30s, had little butch representation or friendship growing up and they have now become something like father figures to Alexa Legend and Skye Valentinez, who are in their 20s.

“We have to protect each other,” King Captain said. “We have to look out for each other.”

Daddii Syd put her arm around Skye Valentinez and said: “Look at this beautiful baby we have.”

That tenderness carried straight into the night. There was a striking seriousness to the whole performance, which spanned from just past 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Unlike a bachelorette party or the typical male revue, there was no giggling in the room, and no wink of camp from the performers. Here was a rare claim to unabashed public sapphic desire; it was given the scale and seriousness routinely afforded to heterosexual display, like the gleeful bravado of a man striding into Hooters.

By the end of the night at Sassafras Saloon, the performers had stripped down nearly to nothing, pouring water over themselves while the audience roared. The atmosphere felt like one of collective release, a recognition that masculinity and desire don’t belong only to men — that a group of four masc lesbians can be horny, inspire horniness and ultimately stir a hysteria that once greeted Channing Tatum or even the Beatles.

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It was the magnitude of the response that night at the Saloon, as on every other night they’ve performed, that’s inspiring their next moves: total domination in sum. The troupe is already planning a national tour through Florida, Dallas and Sacramento, though Daddii Syd’s ambitions extend much further.

“The idea,” she told me, “is to go global. Like a boy band.”

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