AAPI Heritage Month

AAPI Heritage Month is the federal observance held every May to honor the history and contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The month wasn't picked at random. May commemorates two specific dates.

1. May 7, 1843 — the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants to the United States.
2. May 10, 1869 — the completion of the transcontinental railroad, built in large part by Chinese immigrant labor.

It began as a week. After years of advocacy led by Jeanie F. Jew, President Jimmy Carter signed a joint resolution in 1978 designating the week beginning May 4, 1979 as Asian Pacific American Heritage Week. President George H. W. Bush extended it to a full month in 1990, and Congress made the May designation permanent in 1992.

The umbrella is wide, covering heritage from across East, South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. That is exactly why the menu on this page runs from Japanese okonomiyaki to Indian tikka masala to Hawaiian huli huli chicken, instead of picking one country and calling it representative.

Yes. AAPI covers heritage from across the Asian continent and the Pacific Islands: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka alongside China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam, together with Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Chamorro and other Pacific Islander communities. It is a genuinely wide umbrella, and that breadth is why no single dish speaks for the whole month. Our Indian Tikka Masala workshop, where your team makes naan from scratch alongside the curry, sits on the same page as Japanese sushi and Thai summer rolls for that reason. Book two dates and you cover more ground.

Each workshop carries a piece of history, and your chef tells it while you cook rather than before you start.

• Okonomiyaki means, roughly, grilled how you like it. Okonomi is what you prefer, yaki is grilled. It is a Japanese street-food pancake built from the ground up to be customized, which is also why it handles a mixed-diet team so gracefully.
• Huli means turn in Hawaiian. Huli huli chicken takes its name from cooks flipping the birds back and forth over the fire, calling out as they went.
• Sushi names the rice, not the fish. The word refers to the seasoned, vinegared rice, which is why the chef spends real time on the rice before anyone picks up a bamboo mat.
• Scallion pancakes are laminated like puff pastry. The dough is rolled, oiled, coiled and rolled again, and those hidden layers are what make it shatter when you bite it.

None of this is trivia for its own sake. An hour of cooking is a low-pressure way to hear where a food actually comes from, and it lands better than a slide deck.

No cooking experience needed, and it reads as a class rather than a costume party. A professional chef teaches real technique and explains where the dish comes from while your team works, so the culture arrives through the food instead of around it. There is nothing to dress up in and nothing to perform. The chef never gets ahead of the slowest kitchen, and the Zoom host runs trivia and a mini scavenger hunt so the quieter half of the call has something to do. Customization is free, so if your ERG wants its own speaker up front, more time on one region, or the last ten minutes held for a group conversation, say so when you book.

Yes, and none of it is charged as an extra provided you tell us in advance. Some of these menus start out accommodating: the Vegetable Gyoza and the Scallion Pancakes are vegetarian and vegan as written, and the tikka masala takes chickpeas in place of the chicken. Kosher and no-alcohol versions are routine on the rest.

On the geography: US shipping is free, and we deliver to teammates in Australia, the UK, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, Mexico, India and Spain among other countries. Anyone the courier can't reach cooks from a shopping list instead of watching. Zoom is the default and Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and WebEx all work. A group can be 3 people or 600, and the very large ones are split by department or over two days.

Run it twice, or aim at the evening in Asia. Splitting a group across two sittings is already routine for very large teams, so asking for a second seating so that Bengaluru and Singapore aren't cooking at 3am is a normal request rather than a favor. Ask your planner how a second session is quoted, so it doesn't arrive as a surprise on the invoice. If you'd rather keep everyone in one room, an early-morning slot on the US East Coast lands at the end of the working day in India and in the evening across Southeast Asia. Kits go out ahead either way, including to India and Australia, and anyone the courier can't reach cooks from a shopping list. Chef availability sets the hour, so give your planner two or three windows and they'll tell you what's open.

The rate is not a starting figure to be built on later. It already carries your chef, the Zoom host who runs the games and watches the chat, and the planner who assembled the whole thing; every ingredient shipped free and insured inside the US, portioned into kits that feed four; and free customization, free dietary swaps, the trivia, the mini scavenger hunt and gratuities.

What sits outside the rate is a short list: a sake etiquette session, a sushi kit with rice paddles, chopsticks and a rolling mat, a wine pairing, or a cocktail alongside the drunken noodles. ERGs running several observances a year often skip the per-event arithmetic altogether and put one annual culture budget into the Culture Subscription, then spend credits as each month comes around.

May is the constraint, not the menu. Thirty-one days, one chef roster, and every ERG in the country aiming at the same handful of Tuesdays, so the earlier you name a date the more of this menu list is still open to you. Three weeks is the working minimum for a cooking event; for May itself, give yourself more. Rush dates do happen when a chef has the day free, so ask before writing one off.

A $250 deposit holds the slot, by credit card, ACH transfer or check. Cancel 21 or more days out and you are refunded what you paid less any nonrecoverable costs already committed; 8 to 20 days out you choose between a 50% refund and a 100% Rockoly credit; inside 8 days payments are nonrefundable, though one complimentary reschedule is yours if you ask 14+ days ahead. Rockoly has run over 1,000 events and holds a 5-star Google rating across 105 reviews, and every booking carries the Love Your Event Guarantee: if your event doesn't live up to expectations, we'll make it right.

Start with the inquiry form on this page. (617) 939-9732 and events@rockoly.com reach the same planners if you would rather talk it through first.