Lunar New Year

It moves because the calendar does. Lunar New Year falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice, which puts it anywhere from late January to the third week of February and can shift it by nearly a month from one year to the next. The celebration runs about fifteen days and closes with the Lantern Festival. It reaches well beyond China: Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, Tet in Vietnam, Seollal in Korea, and diaspora communities everywhere. Each year is named for one of twelve zodiac animals on a repeating cycle. Check the date early with your planner, because the window is narrow and it's the one part of this event you can't move.

Almost everything on a Lunar New Year table is there for a reason, and the reason is usually a pun.

• Dumplings are folded to resemble yuanbao, the boat-shaped gold ingots of imperial China, so a plate of them reads as a wish for wealth. Families traditionally fold them together on New Year's Eve, which is the part that maps neatly onto a team event.
• Noodles are served long and uncut. The length is the wish: long life. Cutting them is bad form.
• Fish is served whole because the word for fish, yu, sounds like the word for surplus. The phrase you hear at the table translates as may there be surplus every year.
• Nian gao, the sticky rice cake, sounds like higher year, which makes it a wish for growth, promotion, a better twelve months than the last.
• The character fu, meaning fortune, is hung upside down on doors, because upside down sounds like has arrived. Luck has arrived.

The dumpling is the one your team can actually make here. The Vegetable Gyoza workshop is the Japanese descendant of Chinese jiaozi, and your team pleats them by hand from dough it makes itself. If the symbolism is the point for your group, start there.

Five hands-on workshops, each 60 to 90 minutes.

• Vegetable Gyoza is the dumpling, and the one workshop that carries the holiday's own symbolism. Your team makes the dough from scratch and pleats every piece by hand, which is the most tactile hour on the list.
• Bao Buns are the Chinese steamed bun everyone gathers around, filled with beef and scallion or with mushroom. Also scratch dough, also 90 minutes.
• Scallion Pancakes are the crowd-pleaser: a layered Chinese flatbread rolled, oiled and coiled like puff pastry so it comes out shatter-crisp. Vegetarian and vegan as standard, with a gluten-free option.
• Japanese Sushi, which on this page is California Maki Rolls, and Okonomiyaki are here as East Asian favorites rather than as Lunar New Year dishes, since Japan has kept its New Year on January 1 since 1873. Teams pick them when they want the sushi rolling or the griddle, and the sake etiquette add-on pairs with either.

If none of the five is quite right, customization is free and your planner can pull from our full workshop menu instead.

It's a chef teaching a dish properly, which settles most of it. Your team spends the hour on real work, pleating dumplings, folding bao and getting sushi rice to behave, and the meaning of the food comes from the person teaching it rather than from decoration. There are no costumes, no props and no fortune-telling. You don't need cooks either: the chef never gets ahead of the slowest kitchen, and the Zoom host runs trivia and a mini scavenger hunt. Rockoly has hosted over 1,000 events and is rated 5 stars on Google across 105 reviews. If your ERG wants its own remarks up front, say so when you book.

There is, and the etiquette is easier than it looks. Red envelopes — hongbao in Mandarin, lai see in Cantonese — pass from elders to younger people and from employers to staff, and most of the custom is about the number inside.

• Eight is the number you want. Ba sounds like fa, to prosper.
• Four is the one to avoid. Si sounds like the word for death.
• Keep the amount even. Odd amounts belong to funerals.
• Use new, crisp bills, and hand the envelope over with both hands.
• The person receiving it traditionally waits until later to open it, so nobody is counting in front of you.

The workshop gives you the moment to do it in: the end of the session, when the food is done and everyone's still on the call. Rockoly offers gift options, so ask your planner what's available if you'd rather not source anything yourself, and tell them what you've planned either way. Customization is free, and they'll leave room for it in the run of show.

It does, and neither costs extra when you share the details in advance. Two of these menus need no adjusting at all: the Vegetable Gyoza and the Scallion Pancakes are vegetarian and vegan as written, with a gluten-free option, and the bao take a mushroom filling instead of the beef. Kosher and no-alcohol versions are ordinary requests on the others.

For the countries: shipping is free inside the US, and kits go out to Australia, the UK, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, Mexico, India and Spain among other places. Where a courier can't reach someone, a shopping list does the job instead. Zoom is the default, with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and WebEx supported. Headcount runs from 3 to 600 and beyond; the biggest groups split by department or across two days.

Five menus, and the per-person rate steps down twice as the group grows. From 5 to 30 people, Okonomiyaki and Scallion Pancakes are $139 a head, Japanese Sushi and Vegetable Gyoza $149, Bao Buns $159. Above 30 each drops $10, and above 50 another $10, so sixty people making bao pay $139 each. Under five is a flat $695 to $795.

Everything the event needs is already inside that number: your chef, a Zoom host on the games and the chat, a dedicated planner, every ingredient shipped free and insured within the US in a kit portioned for four, free customization, free dietary adjustments, gratuities and all service fees.

The optional layer is small: a sushi kit with rice paddles, chopsticks and a rolling mat, a sake etiquette session, a wine pairing. One thing worth knowing before you count heads is that partners and family join free on the same screen. For a holiday whose entire premise is the family reunion dinner, that tends to change who turns up.

Check the date before you do anything else. Lunar New Year follows the moon and can land anywhere from late January to the third week of February, so the first job is confirming which week you are actually planning for. Your planner will tell you in one message.

After that, three weeks is the working lead time for a cooking event, and this holiday deserves more, because the celebration compresses into about a fortnight and every team wants the same days. Rush dates are sometimes possible depending on chef availability. 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.

The inquiry form on this page is the quickest way in, and (617) 939-9732 reaches a planner directly. The Love Your Event Guarantee covers whatever you book: your team should have a genuinely good hour, and if it doesn't live up to expectations, we'll make it right.