The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tradition with a twist
Recipes to celebrate the Lunar New Year but with a Chinese-American flair.
Growing up in the U.S., Chinese New Year was always a special time for chef George Yu and his business partner, Michael Lo.
They will be showing that this month at their Decatur restaurant, Makan, when they host a Lunar New Year dinner Feb. 18.
Both were born in China, but Yu’s family is from Taiwan and Lo’s from southern China. Yu lived in Milwaukee, and Lo lived in Philadelphia. Their family and community traditions were somewhat different. But they remember many similarities, too.
“We would always go to Chinatown once a week,” Lo says. “And then for Chinese New Year, we went even more. We had old-school Chinese banquet halls, and Chinese decorations were very accessible to us.”
“It was a little different in Milwaukee,” Yu says. “On Chinese New Year’s Eve, we would have a family dinner together. The grandparents would come and we would roll dumplings and cook a meal together. Usually, on New Year’s Day, we would drive to Chicago and celebrate there and do the banquet.”
Like New Year traditions in the U.S., there are many superstitions connected with Chinese New Year, especially concerning foods you should eat for good luck.
For example, noodles symbolize long life. Dumplings are thought to look like ancient Chinese gold nuggets and represent wealth. The Chinese word for fish, Yu, sounds like the word for abundance, and fish is eaten during New Year celebrations for that reason.
“I would say the southern Chinese are way more superstitious than any other Chinese,” Lo says. “A lot of the stuff around symbolism is mostly southern. They are very keen on synonyms and the words meaning things.”
When we asked Yu to come up with a Chinese New Year menu that American home cooks could make, he went back to many of the things his family enjoyed, including pork dumplings, whole steamed fish, and noodles with braised lamb.
But because he often cooks with seasonal and local ingredients at Makan, he came up with a few twists, including using roasted beets in place of traditional long beans in a vegetable dish with black bean sauce.
As far as the menu for the eight-course Lunar New Year dinner he’s planning at Makan, Yu says he’s excited both to honor and to break with tradition.
“I’m writing a menu that’s not quite traditional,” Yu says. “It’s a little out there, I guess. I look at it as a Chinese-American way of cooking. We’re going to do courses that are more modern with dishes that are more composed and use a wider array of ingredients. It will be fun.”