Lunar New Year festivities in China are preceded by days of preparation leading up to the first new moon of the calendar, including cleaning the house, clearing the clutter and getting a head start on the dumplings.

These traditions followed Alexandria Holland from China, where she was born and then adopted, to different parts of Asia with her parents, and now to Denver, where she owns a tea shop, Kochi Cafe, at 4100 E. 8th Ave.. She learned to make dumplings as a girl and practiced with relatives while attending high school in Shanghai.

Related: The Denver Post is currently our annual food bracket, this year featuring dumplings. Vote now for your favorites.

“From my experience and my friends’ experience, it can be a really fun, lowkey way to meet people,” said Holland, 28. “It’s easy to spark up conversations when your hands are busy.”

Last Friday, about 20 customers showed up at Kochi to participate in Holland’s celebration, where they learned how to fill and wrap dumplings, boil them, and later — the best part — eat the miniature crescent-shaped pouches.

Holland had cooked the vegetarian and chicken fillings for the dumplings, minced almost to a paste, three nights earlier, and purchased enough dumpling wrapper packs from the grocery store to make 500 in total. She wrapped 200 of them herself, two nights before the event, freezing them and bringing them to the shop as reinforcements.

Most of the participants weren’t Asian. They were there to learn about Lunar New Year, and guests took great interest in scooping the dumpling filling from shared bowls into the wrappers, folding and pleating their edges into miniature crescent shapes.

As batches of dumplings were boiled in pots of water, her friend and co-organizer Xinyi Shen entertained with a presentation about the Lunar New Year in China. The holiday, which was Feb. 17 this year, is celebrated differently by the Han people, the ethnic majority, and the country’s more than 50 minority ethnic groups, she explained.

“Not all Chinese people eat dumplings during the Lunar New Year,” Shen said. They’re a traditional food mainly in the country’s northern provinces. On the last day of the Chinese New Year, known as the Lantern Festival, celebrants eat another type of dumpling, tangyuan, which are rice balls filled with a sweet filling, she added.

Dumplings come in all shapes and sizes, with the dough and fillings usually made fresh in large family gatherings at home.

For Kuanrong Zhu, 28, a friend of Shen’s who assisted during the event, filling and folding dumplings by hand with her relatives in Broomfield is an annual tradition. They made two different varieties earlier that week, she said: pork and shrimp with chives; and pork with napa cabbage.

How many dumplings can one make in a sitting? “Depends on how many people you can gather,” said Zhu.

The group at Kochi Cafe used all the packs of wrappers that Holland supplied. She, Shen and Zhu, who Shen said is the best dumpling folder she knows, demonstrated their techniques around the room. Zhu explained to one group how a wrap that’s thicker in the center and more flexible around the edges can hold more filling while retaining its shape.

Holland and her parents opened a previous version of Kochi Cafe in Thailand in 2012. But when she moved to Denver to attend college, a Kochi location followed. She took over the business in 2020.

Today, she sources teas domestically and from China, she said. Glass jars full of tea leaves are arranged around the Kochi Cafe room. Over the past year, she and Shen have hosted tea parties and other events inside the space.

Zhu and Steve Carman, who owns an aquarium maintenance company, helped Holland bring the trays of wrapped dumplings behind the counter. They dropped dumplings into boiling water in groups of fewer than ten at a time, stirring occasionally to separate them. Condensation built up on the shop’s windows, obscuring the view from outside.

“Typically for New Year, we do everything boiled, because you don’t want to burn away good fortune,” Holland said, one of the many superstitions associated with the Lunar New Year in China. (Others include not taking out the trash or doing any sort of housework during the holiday period, she said.)