Walk through Chinatown right now, and you’ll see stacks of red envelopes blanketing shelves, markets with overflowing displays of ripe pomelos, and families dressed up for Lunar New Year celebrations. The year of the snake kicks off Wednesday, and the 15-day new year celebration will be marked across many cultures.

Koreans, who call the holiday Seollal, may meet up with family to eat tteokguk and play the traditional board game yutnori. For those of Chinese descent, the holiday might be marked by decorating the house with citrus to invite good fortune before welcoming family to a table overflowing with changshou mian (“longevity noodles”) or tang yuan. 

For San Francisco chefs, Lunar New Year is an opportunity to reflect on their roots. “For me, the holiday isn’t just a celebration,” says Vietnamese American chef Tu David Phu, “it’s a reminder of where we come from and the love we carry forward.” 

Here’s how four chefs make the most of the Lunar New Year in San Francisco.

When Fang was a kid, her family would lay out a “sweet tray” full of candied lotus roots, sesame brittle, and coconut peanut cookies — a tradition she keeps alive using an antique tray passed down by her father. Every Lunar New Year’s Eve, she makes egg rolls, rice cakes, dumplings, and tang yuan soup — “the essential Lunar New Year musts for Shanghainese people” — to eat with her parents, husband, and kids. 

Fang rarely misses a chance to stop by her Chinatown standbys during the holiday, including Yummy Bakery for pineapple buns and egg tarts and Sun Kau Shing Co. for traditional sweets such as candied lotus root. This year, her love of tang yuan, the sweet rice balls often eaten for the holiday, inspired her to collaborate with Smitten Ice Cream on a new flavor, Vanilla-Black Sesame Mochi. “I thought the black sesame and vanilla combo with chewy mochi would be a great nostalgic bite,” Fang says. 

Phu rarely misses a chance to make thit kho trung, caramelized pork and eggs, with his family to celebrate the holiday, which in Vietnam is known as Tet. The dish is a symbol of goodness, happiness, and love. “For the Vietnamese diaspora, it carries so much meaning — every bite feels like family, no matter how far apart we are,” Phu says.

To nod to these traditions, Phu’s newly opened Vietnamese-inspired wine bar Gigi’s will serve his rendition of crispy pork belly, a traditional Lunar New Year dish. “It’s our way of sharing the warmth and flavors that define this time of year in Vietnamese homes.”  

To add to the festivities, Phu and his family have a ritual of going to Harborview, a “must-visit,” for pineapple buns and dim sum, and to Abacá, where chef Francis Ang creates a Filipino Chinese New Year menu featuring Dungeness crab hot-and-sour soup and seared siopao filled with chestnuts. 

Chinese New Year offers Chou a chance to do something “explicitly Cantonese — to remind myself of my grandmother and our ancestors and all they’ve been through to get us to this point now.” Growing up in the Sunset, that meant putting on her red cheongsam and trekking to Oakland with her sister to meet extended family at the now-closed restaurant King Wah, where they received coveted red envelopes and loaded up on “the best banquet foods,” like fried chicken served with shrimp chips. 

Today, Chou’s making her own traditions at Grand Opening, her popular weekend pastry pop-up, where she’ll be baking limited-edition items such as black sesame almond tea cakes, pistachio almond cookies, and black sesame and peanut cheese tarts with fresh ginger cream and miso caramel.  

On her day off, Chou will head to Oakland’s Chinatown to pick up essentials for her at-home celebration, like “bass from the tanks for steaming, lots of gailan and dau miu, and, of course, some mandarins.” In San Francisco, she’ll stop by Cheung Hing in the Outer Sunset for roast duck and roast pork, and her mom will make jai packed with fat choy, gingko nuts, tofu skins, lily buds, glass noodles, and lotus seeds. “It’s the only time of year I eat it,” she says. “It feels nostalgic and restorative.”

Tay Esposito, a fourth-generation Chinese-Malaysian American, keeps up a lot of her childhood holiday traditions. For good karma, she’ll go meatless on the first day of the new year. For prosperity, she’ll make chye choy, a furu-based stir fry with shiitake mushrooms, napa cabbage, glass noodles, tofu puffs, and a black sea moss called “fatt choy.”  

On Lunar New Year’s Eve, Tay Esposito will team with chefs Elise Hayashi and Henry Hsu on a Reunion Dinner at 18 Reasons. The sold-out dinner will honor Korean, Taiwanese, and Malaysian Lunar New Year traditions; Tay-Esposito will focus on Malaysian-Singaporean dishes like bakwa (grilled pork jerky), yusheng “prosperity salad,” nyona-style grilled fish stuffed with sambal on banana leaves, and a thumbprint-cookie play on a pineapple tart.   

She keeps a packed holiday schedule, making sure to pop by her favorite shopping spots: Abacus Row’s Lunar New Year pop-ups for mandarins, Sandy’s Lucky Bamboo and Florist for pussy willows, and AA Bakery for fa gao rice cakes and sweet nian gao.