For New Year’s Eve, chefs across the city create multicourse dinners filled with ingredients like fresh oysters, foie gras, and dry-aged, grass-fed beef. Champagne bottles are uncorked and the contents consumed with abandon. In the restaurant world, New Year’s feasts have become a celebratory, indulgent tradition.
These meals mark the start of a new year as defined by the Western calendar, also known as the Christian or Gregorian calendar, after Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in 1582. But thousands of years before the pope gave us his calendar, civilizations across the world measured the passage of time by lunar calendars. The Lunar New Year doesn’t occur on the fixed date of January 1, instead falling sometime in late January or early February.
The new lunar year begins this Monday, February 8. And even though it doesn’t get the fanfare that New Year’s Eve meals get, for Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese people, Lunar New Year is a deeply significant holiday. Celebrations vary, but they share one important characteristic: elaborate home-cooked meals eaten with loved ones…
