Traditional Holidays and their Special Foods

Korea’s lunar calendar is marked with many holidays that Koreans love to celebrate with pomp and food. They observe these traditional holidays, many of which go way back to their early history, and particular foods have been associated with the holidays.

Take Seollal, the Korean New Year, which is the first day of the Korean lunar calendar. One of the most significant traditional holidays, it’s a 3-day family affair where many return to their hometowns to visit parents, grandparents, in-laws and relatives, even for Koreans living overseas. Traditional foods are placed on a table as an offering to the ancestors, and the family usually dress up in colorful traditional clothes.

Tteokguk (soup with sliced rice cakes) is customarily eaten for the New Year. The Korean New Year is similar to a birthday for Koreans, and eating tteokguk is part of the birthday celebration. Once you finish eating your tteokguk, you are one year older. Jeon is another traditional dish especially eaten on the day. It’s a savory pancake not sliced with a knife but ripped apart with chopsticks in the belief of making it taste better.

Chuseok is a harvest festival a three-day celebration visiting ancestral grave sites and removing weeds around the grave to clean their ancestor’s site. They offer food, drink, and crops to their ancestors’ spirits. As a celebration of the good harvest, Koreans visit their ancestral hometowns and share a feast of Korean traditional food such as songpyeon and rice wines such as sindoju and dongdongju.

Bellevue Korean Restaurant keeps Traditions

If you drop by our Korean restaurant in Bellevue during any of these special seasons, you will surely taste and experience the traditional dishes shared by all Koreans wherever they are around the world. Come and see for yourself.