The 2025 Lunar New Year Festival has started at Disney California Adventure. Running from January 17th to February 16th, this annual celebration includes entertainment, interactive experiences, decorations and food! This festival includes six different Festival Marketplaces (food booths) as well as some items added to the typical restaurant menus. In this post, we’ll rank every specialty food item that we’ve tried at DCA’s 2025 Lunar New Year Festival.

Like all California Adventure festivals, this edition features a Sip & Savor Pass. For those unfamiliar, guests purchase a plastic pass and lanyard that comes with 6 ‘digital tabs’. Those tabs are good for any non-alcoholic item at the Festival Marketplaces, as well as several at regular counter-service restaurants. You can view the menus here! The Sip & Savor Pass costs $48 ($45 for Magic Key Holders). This isn’t some remarkable value but if you’re planning to eat around the festival for a few days, then it will probably save you a few dollars.

We’ll stick to just ranking the Sip & Savor items in this post, as my cocktail taste is probably a bit different from yours. We still have a few items to try over the next week (specifically some non-alcoholic drinks) before this post covers everything, but we have a good start here. I have to wait until there’s more room left in my stomach. This research is really hard work! If you have any questions about Sip & Savor or the festival in general, leave them in the comments below.

As always, our rankings are subjective. Festival food can especially be hit and miss, with some people getting a good batch of food while others are left with something that’s been sitting a little too long. I tried to focus on the flavors here but am not advocating that you take my word as gospel. I’m no Lisan al-Gaib. Let’s get to the rankings!

17. Kung Pao Bao (Prosperity Bao & Buns)

I’ll say this for the 2025 Lunar New Year Festival food: None of it is downright bad. What finishes at the bottom of the list is more boring than bad. That’s especially true for the Kung Pao Bao which consists of plant-based chicken, toasted peanuts, and scallions. There’s just nothing here that pops out. The serving size is very small considering the price and the flavors were decisively average.

16. Red Panda Bao (Prosperity Bao & Buns)

The Red Panda Bao certainly looks exciting but the flavors inside just didn’t do it for me. This consists of a jumbo pork and vegetable bao with chile-garlic sauce. I liked the sauce well enough, as it added some spice. The pork and vegetable filling was less interesting, coming off as bland.

15. Mandarin Orange Cream Puff (Wrapped with Love)

I really liked the concept here but it just didn’t come together for me. This beautiful creation was filled with citrus cream and Mandarin compote. The flavors were pretty distinct and a little more complex than most desserts at the festival. Unfortunately, the bitterness won out in the taste and it was more interesting than it was delicious.

14. Garlic Noodles (Longevity Noodle Co.)

The Garlic Noodles were tasty but fairly generic. I thought they had a very buttery noodle taste with parmesan on top. What did differentiate them was when the garlic kicked in, that gave the dish some depth. I don’t think these were overly unique and they’d be easy to replicate at home, but they did taste good.

13. Fried Lemongrass Chicken Dumplings (Wrapped with Love)

I wanted to like these more than I actually did. The dumplings were served with a plum sauce and weren’t bad overall. I liked the chicken and the lemongrass flavor was nice but a bit overpowering. This is slightly more ambitious than the next entry but not quite as good, in my opinion. That said, if you like lemon chicken then you’ll probably enjoy this!

12. Fire Chicken Wings (Red Dragon Spice Trader)

I have a confession: Chicken wings aren’t really my thing. I don’t actively dislike them, I just find the balance of work in eating them to enjoyment of eating them to be off-kilter. With that off my chest, these were pretty good wings with so much spice! The sesame seaweed crunch on top was largely unnoticeable and the sauce was very thick in parts. If you really like spicy wings then this will scratch that itch, if you don’t like spice then run the other way.

11. Shrimp Lo Mein (Longevity Noodle Co.)

This dish, consisting of pan-fried lo mein noodles with sautéed shrimp garnished with green onions, packed some flavor into it. I was impressed by the noodles themselves as they had a good sauce and better than other options that had been at this booth over the years. The shrimp also had good flavor but they were rubbery and felt like they’d been sitting out for a while as is unfortunately the case with many festival foods. Overall, I liked this one quite a bit but there were some drawbacks.

10. Beef and Broccoli (Paradise Garden Grill)

One of the plant-based dishes of this festival, I was impressed by how good the imitation steak was. I’d eat it again! The rest of the dish was made up of fried rice, green onion, and toasted sesame seeds. This is better than Panda Express Beef and Broccoli but not by a wide enough margin for me to rank it higher than number 10.

9. Mickey Chinese Hot Dog Bun (Select Vending Carts)

I’m as surprised as you are that this ended up as high as it did. The Mickey shaped bun has just a touch of sweetness along with the sesame seeds and scallions mixed in. The hot dogs put in the bun tasted similar to smokies instead of actual hot dogs. All of it worked well but your mileage may vary now that they are served out of the vending carts.

8. Mini Char Siu Pork Shanks (Bamboo Blessings)

These pork shanks make for a sweet and savory dish. Two pieces of pork are served with rice and pineapple chutney. The pork was surprisingly good and mixed well with a sweet & sour sauce. As for the pineapple chutney, it had some spice to it but added some freshness to the dish. I liked this pretty well but wasn’t blown away.

7. Green Tea Horchata (Cappuccino Cart)

This drink was really well balanced, with even layers of cinnamon, green tea and cream. It’s a really refreshing drink to walk around the park with. There’s boba in this drink with a flavor that really reminded me of cheesecake. The menus don’t actually say what it was but I ended up thinking they were an asset to the drink rather than a deterrent.

6. Spicy Gochujang Chicken Taco (Red Dragon Spice Traders)

On the reverse side of the chicken wings, I’ve never really met a taco that I didn’t like. This one did the trick for me although I wish the portion was a little bigger. $8 for a taco in Southern California is blasphemy! The spicy chicken was topped with a yuja citrus cabbage slaw, to give a little sweet and spicy combination. While I wouldn’t quite consider this a top tier dish, I did enjoy the fusion and flavor.

5. Chocolate Firecracker (Lucky 8 Lantern)

We’ve got a beautiful dessert here consisting of light chocolate mousse, chocolate ganache filling, chocolate almond dacquoise, and popping candy featuring DOVE Dark Chocolate. The chocolate mousse is the dominant flavor here but it is light and delicious. The pop rocks on top don’t add much flavor but they do make the concept of the dessert more fun. All in all, this is a good option for chocolate lovers!

4. Strawberry Milk Tea Macaron (Bamboo Blessings)

Our highest ranked dessert of the festival is this gigantic macaron. Filled with strawberry buttercream and a milk tea center, the dessert had more than met the eye or the ingredient listing. Inside was a nice jam along with a little bit of chocolate. Some bites tasted like a good version of a Strawberry Pop Tart (no shade intended, those are good!) while others were more complex.

3. Pho Dip (Wrapped with Love)

The concept here is basically a French Dip sandwich but with all the ingredients of Pho and it works incredibly well. Consisting of rice noodles, sliced beef, shaved jalapeños, pickled onions and bread that you dip into a pho broth, this really does taste like the delicious soup on a sandwich. It’s a little hard to eat, as the noodles get displaced but sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and embrace it. The portion size here was the largest of the festival, at least in our case.

2. Scallion Pancake Tostada (Studios Catering Co.)

If it weren’t for my undying loyalty to the Quesabirria Egg Roll, this would be an easy number 1. In fact, this is one of the best DCA festival foods I’ve tried, full stop. The tostada consists of a fried scallion pancake, bulgogi beef, kimchi aïoli, and spicy scallion salad. While it said spicy in the description, we didn’t find that to be the case. The pancake is fried a little more than usual to hold the rest of the dish together, giving it a nice crunch. Everything pairs wonderfully. If there’s a small nit to pick, it’s that the bulgogi beef is a tiny bit chewy but the flavor more than makes up for it.

1. Quesabirria Egg Roll (Lucky 8 Lantern)

I’d elect this dish into the Festival Food Hall of Fame! I’ll even order the plaque! This Egg Roll is filled with Oaxaca cheese, beef birria, and a side of guajillo pepper consommé. Birria is having a well deserved moment, at least around Southern California, and Disney has jumped into that game. Juicy, tender and flavorful beef along with cheese inside of a fried dough is always going to work for me but this manages to not be overly heavy or greasy. The consommé adds a savory stew like flavor to dip the Egg Roll in. As this continues to come back to the festival every year, the quality has dipped a little bit. But it’s still delicious and our favorite item here.

What are your favorite items at this year’s Lunar New Year Festival? Let us know, along with any questions you might have, in the comments! Planning a trip to Disneyland? Check out our Planning Guide here. This site has you covered for Disneyland discount tickets! If you enjoy what you are reading here on Wandering in Disney please share this post with your friends, as well as like our social media pages. You can also subscribe to the blog via WordPress or email. All of those links are on the right side of this page. Thank you for reading, we really appreciate it!