Collage featuring a plate of food and the flags of Hawaii, China, and Malaysia.

Stir Fried: How these API chefs celebrate Lunar New Year in North America

Let's look at how some of our favorite restaurateurs bring their unique backgrounds to the table for the holiday

Words by Clara Wang

Stir Fried: The story of any immigrant diaspora is the story of how outsiders became insiders, and nothing tells this story better than food. Names may get scrambled, languages forgotten, neighborhoods gentrified—but no matter how muddled histories become, the truth is served on a plate. Stir Fried breaks down the weird, messy, bastardized fusion cuisines that tell the story of Asian diaspora communities around the world.


Among the two billion Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese people who celebrate Lunar New Year, foods and traditions vary infinitely from one village to the next. For those in the Asian diaspora, where you landed and grew up adds further nuance.

This special Lunar New Year’s edition of Stir Fried spotlights the Lunar New Year tables of chefs who have grown up or settled in different regions of North America, and how their journeys have shaped their approach to the holiday.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Cathy and Matthew Mai - Mai Little China, Greenwood, Mississippi

Chef Matthew Mai standing by a platter of food.

Matthew Mai (pictured) and his wife Cathy opened Mai Little China in 2007 in Mississippi.

Courtesy of Mai Little China

Cathy Mai grew up as part of a small but close-knit Chinese American community that had settled in the Mississippi Delta. She met her husband, Matthew, while traveling in Hong Kong. Matthew is originally from Tai Shan village in Guangdong, China, but worked as a professional chef in Hong Kong for many years. The two opened Mai Little China in 2007.

Clara Wang: What was Lunar New Year dinner like growing up in 1960’s Greenwood, Mississippi?
Cathy Mai: My father was originally from China, and my mother was born here and then grew up in China. After she came back to the U.S., she did not speak English. She lived in the Northeast, where there is a large Chinese community and Chinatowns, she had a lot of family up there. At some point in her life, she moved down to Mississippi, where there were a lot of Chinese at the time, but there were no Asian markets or Chinese restaurants or anything like that. If she wanted any Chinese food, she had to make it herself. 

My mom used to order supplies from San Francisco, and they would come every so often, and she would get a truckload of supplies, dry goods, canned goods, and what have you. And she just learned to make everything. So growing up, we always had traditional fare at Lunar New Year. She would make the soup with fa cai (dried seaweed) and dried oyster. She’d always make roast duck, sometimes roast pork belly. And, of course, always vegetables. And she would make all these dumplings, you know, the gok zai (Cantonese sweet fried dumplings), the shumai, steamed and fried. And sesame balls…So we had a pretty traditional (Lunar New Year) dinner growing up, even in Mississippi.

CW: What were some Southern dishes that got incorporated into your celebrations as the years went on?
CM: My mom used to make spaghetti in a wok [Laughs]. But my brother’s in-laws lived in town, so they would cook the traditional American fare and we would trade. And then when I got older, I got into more American dishes…and then she would make black-eyed peas, turnip greens…traditionally you put hog jowls in it. But her twist on black-eyed peas is that she would put shiitakes in it, and that made it really good. 

CW: This question is for both you and Matthew. Now that you’re together, what do you eat for Lunar New Year?
CM: We always have a chicken, you know, my mom and his mom too. So we always have the poached chicken with the ginger scallion sauce. And the kids like that. But we just basically cook the things that they like. So sometimes it might be steak. I have two boys that love steak. I have one that loves crab legs. Sometimes we make the little dumplings, and even the sesame balls.

Matthew Mai [as translated from Cantonese by Cathy]: In his hometown, they start off with the same fa cai soup, and then a vegetarian dish, and then a nine-course meal. They start off with the soup, and then the chicken, and a braised whole goose with taro. Pan-fried fish. His hometown is famous for the cauliflower, so they always have that. 

Matthew says that in China, shortly after they had the New Year dinner, they would have another huge dinner where they invited all of their friends over. And then another friend would host another party at their house. That goes on for about a week. And on the seventh day it’s like a birthday dinner, they’re celebrating everybody’s birthday.

CW: What are Lunar New Year dinners like now?
CM: We have a nonprofit organization that introduces art to young children called ArtPlace here in Greenwood, and so they reached out to us last year about doing a Lunar New Year celebration dinner. We thought it might be a fun way to represent our family and our culture. So there are some traditional foods we do, and some that are tweaked a little differently, you know, to be able to satisfy American palates here. We still have a nine-course meal. But just for instance, we had hot sour groupers instead of the whole fish, and we had chow mein instead of the glass noodles. We still had the chicken with the ginger scallion sauce. And a lot of dumplings. We’re going to do that again this January.

Chef Kyo Pang, Kopitiam, New York

A spread of food on a table.

Chef Kyo Pang's restaurant, Kopitiam, serves Peranakan food in New York City's Chinatown.

Courtesy of Kopitiam

Chef Kyo Pang is a third-generation Peranakan chef who grew up in Penang, Malaysia. Her restaurant Kopitiam in New York’s Chinatown, which has won awards from James Bea, is named after the coffee shops found throughout Southeast Asia.

CW: What are some Peranakan traditions and foods for Lunar New Year?
Kyo Pang: We practice matriarchal systems, so for Lunar New Year it’s usually very busy, because everybody is trying to come back to the main house where our grandmother is at. Usually for Lunar New Year, we prepare a lot of small bites. Peanut cookies, pineapple tarts. We also have a kuih bangkit, a type of cookie that is very powdery and made from coconut pandan. The minute you put it into your mouth it melts. 

We also do the yee sang salad, which I do at Kopitiam. It’s a colorful prosperity salad that we toss and mix carrots, taro, radish, together for blessings. And also make a lot of kuihs and pray to our ancestors. For Peranakans the most important thing is kuih. We have a lot of guests that come by, and we have (sweets) and a lot of kuihs on the table for them. 

As Peranakans, we have to pray on the first and fifteenth of every lunar month, so everything we serve on the first and fifteenth of every lunar month is the same thing we serve on the table on Lunar New Year. There isn’t too much difference. So crispy pork, Hainanese-style chicken with an aged hen, so the meat will be tougher and it tastes better. For the crispy pork, my dad will usually order an entire pig on the ninth day of the Lunar New Year and we’ll carve it and distribute it to neighbors around us. The ninth day is when we pray to Tian Gong (Chinese folk name for Jade Emperor) for bigger blessings. The fish is a must have. Also Assam prawns, which are made with tamarind so it’s sweet and sour.

CW: What are some of your favorite childhood memories surrounding Lunar New Year?
KP: The first day of the Lunar New Year is actually my dad’s birthday. Growing up I didn’t understand why we would have a cake for him and also a lion dance.

My favorite part of the Lunar New Year is the lion dance. Every year we do that in Kopitiam, and we hire people who come and do the dance. When I was back home in Malaysia, the lion dance would come early in the morning and they would hang up all these vegetables and oranges from the balcony (for the lion dancers to take). And at night my favorite thing was the fireworks. Not so much the eating part—you have your entire family sitting at the table asking you questions you probably don’t want to answer.

CW: How do you celebrate Lunar New Year now?
KP: I have been away from my hometown and my family for about 15 years now, and I don’t have any family members with me. Most of the time I spend is in Kopitiam. Good thing we’re actually in Chinatown, so we can see some Chinese New Year celebrations. We’ll continue to do the yee sang salad at Kopitiam this year, everybody loves that.

I used to have a group of friends that would get together every Lunar New Year—we’re actually four different couples. But basically this year, except for one couple everyone else is breaking up so…[Laughs]. I just went through a divorce, another couple who has been together for 13 years just went through a divorce. But this year, I don’t have any plans yet. 

Chef Eva Chin - Yan Dining Room, Toronto

Chef Eva Chin (right) and a family member holding up signs.

Chef Eva Chin (right) combines Singaporean, Chinese and Hawaiian cuisines for Lunar New Year.

Courtesy of Eva Chin

Chef Eva Chin was born and raised on her grandmother’s farm in Kahuku, Hawaii, to a Hawaiian Samoan Chinese mother and a Chinese Singaporean father. She has helmed many prestigious North American restaurants, including Royal Dinette and Boulevard Kitchen and Bar in Vancouver, British Columbia, Kojin by Momofuku in Toronto, and Avling in Toronto. She currently heads Yan Dining Room, a micro restaurant within Hong Shing Restaurant Group in Toronto. Stay tuned to learn more about her in next month’s edition of Stir Fried.

CW: Growing up, what were some foods your family ate for Lunar New Year?
Eva Chin: My family has Singaporean, Chinese and Hawaiian in it, and something that was really shared amongst all three cultures is actually a form of mochi. In Hawaii we make butter mochi. On the Chinese side of my family, we make nian gao, which is rice cake. And then the Southeast Asian side of my family makes kuih, which is another form of rice cake. It’s pretty incredible, because three distinct cultures share one thing.

Words are very important. Auspiciousness is very important in our family so we have whole fish, whole chicken—things that are whole. Back in Hawaii, when we celebrate our luaus and our dinners, things are always presented whole, whether or not it’s Lunar New Year; whole pig, whole fish on the grill…so it always made sense when it tied into Lunar New Year. 

CW: What are some more Hawaiian Asian foods that you would eat?
EC: (In Hawaii) we have these packages of braised meat called lau laus (wrapped in lau leaves from the taro plant). In Hawaii, we cook it with just meat and some Himalayan and we cook it underground. But with the addition of our Chinese side, we mix sticky rice in with the lau laus and that only happens during Lunar New Year with my family. 

All the women in my family, all my aunties and my mom, they all gather together. It's usually a big party, and I always help out with them. The guys, they always dig out the pits outside, so they do all the heavy work. We do all the roasting when it's time, when all the meat is packed and ready to be roasted, I'll take it out to cook in the EMU, which is the underground pit. 

The Singaporean side of my family makes this meat jerky called bakkwa. One year when my cousin brought it to Hawaii, we started adding Hawaiian sea salt and forms of spices into it. Our family has several versions, and my Hawaiian side of the family is really proud to learn this from the Southeast Asian side of my family. It’s a harmonious blend of two cultures. 

A spread of food on a table.

Chef Eva Chin currently heads Yan Dining Room, a micro restaurant in Toronto.

Courtesy of Eva Chin's family

CW: There are so many generational Asian immigrants in Hawaii that have really melted together. What are some uniquely Hawaiian Asian foods that Hawaiians might enjoy for Lunar New Year?
EC: There’s a type of donut that is eaten a lot during Lunar New Year that was adapted by the Japanese population in Hawaii, but it’s actually a Chinese Lunar New Year sweet dish. The Chinese name for it is sa yong. It’s a type of fluffy, beignet drop-style donut that we eat for Chinese dim sum and Lunar New Year, and when it was brought over to Hawaii, the Japanese adapted it with Okinawa brown sugar. And so it became this Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian sweet delicacy, and I mostly see it during Lunar New Year.

CW: Now that you’re living in Toronto, what does Lunar New Year mean to you?
EC: Lunar New Year took a really special meaning in my life in 2020 because of Toronto. So obviously 2020 was a year of COVID, and in total, Tonronto had eight or 10 lockdowns. It was also my first year moving to Toronto. I moved to the city and Lunar New Year was about to happen and I didn’t know what to do. So I started a Lunar New Year meal kit collaboration with another small Chinese restaurant in a time where we were so severely locked down that we had to figure out the entire menu and recipes over Zoom. We were the first restaurant to attempt a collaboration during the height of COVID and ever since that happened, the city kind of expected me to do a Lunar New Year menu every year. 

And in some ways I love it, because it really kick started my platform in Toronto cooking Chinese food. But more than ever, it also brought together communities that were never brought together. I had communities that were majority Caucasian folks sending me emails that some of their families are interracial. It was the first time they had access to a Lunar New Year meal kit to celebrate it with that side of the family, in this part of the town. Toronto is a city where people have to travel uptown to Markham to get good Chinese food, like in New York, you have to go up to Flushing. So at that time, to be able to offer a Lunar New Year meal kit in the heart of downtown during COVID was really a big deal, and I didn't realize it until years after. And I think it is now my fifth year in Toronto, and I've only become more and more excited for Lunar New Year collaborations. And I think that's one of the most magical things about Lunar New Year for me right now, is that it has become a chance for like-minded chefs to get together and share the nostalgic dishes or reinterpret it.

CW: What’s this year’s Lunar New Year menu going to be like at Yan?
EC: It's my first Lunar New Year collaboration since Yan opened. So it is a big deal for me and my team. One of the dinners is a part two collaboration with Chef Nuit. She's a very well-known Thai chef in Toronto. And last year (at Avling), we did our part one, and one of the first things I learned collaborating with her is that she was a descendant from Chinese ancestors who moved from mainland China. And so we deeply connected on that. And so both of our menus this year and last year are really focused on Thai Chinese roots and how it started, and how Chinese New Year is perceived in Thailand.

The second collaboration is with two other Chinese Cantonese chefs, and we decided to do a Cantonese-inspired feast of Seven Fishes. Seafood is really important in Cantonese cuisine. Toronto is a deeply Jewish Italian city—lots of deep history in that. For folks who grew up in Toronto, if you have an Italian friend somehow in your childhood memory, you’ve sat down to the feast of Seven Fishes. And so we wanted to bring a Cantonese-inspired reinterpretation: What would a feast of Seven Fishes be with Cantonese cooking and technique?

Published on January 22, 2025

Words by Clara Wang

Clara Wang is a freelance writer based in Austin, TX but often found wandering abroad exploring culture through the lens of food and drink. Her work has been featured in publications such as Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, Eater Austin, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, the Austin American Statesman, and the Daily Dot. Her monthly column Stir Fried explores Asian diasporic cuisines around the world.

Art by Ryan Quan

Ryan Quan is the Social Media Editor for JoySauce. This queer, half-Chinese, half-Filipino writer and graphic designer loves everything related to music, creative nonfiction, and art. Based in Brooklyn, he spends most of his time dancing to hyperpop and accidentally falling asleep on the subway. Follow him on Instagram at @ryanquans.