Taste of China returns to Downtown Cary Park Nov 7

Mark your calendar for Saturday, November 7: the sixth annual Taste of China festival is back at Downtown Cary Park, and it's one of the biggest cultural events in North Carolina. It runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., it's free, and it's open to all ages, so it's an easy one to drop into with the whole family. The Town of Cary co-hosts, and the Chinese-American Friendship Association of North Carolina (CAFA) puts it all together.

The scale is what catches most people off guard. There are more than 80 vendors and 400 performers, and a good chunk of them are recruited through WeChat and travel from out of state to be part of it. You'll find authentic Chinese and Asian food, live cultural performances including lion dance and traditional arts, and plenty of family-friendly activities. Festival director Jianping Yang points you toward the dumplings, bao buns, and skewers as the ones to try. It's not a small gathering, either — it pulls in between 20,000 and 30,000 people every year, and it's grown into one of the largest cultural festivals in the state.

The venue itself is worth a look. Downtown Cary Park is a seven-acre park right in the middle of downtown Cary, at 327 S. Academy St., and it opened back in November 2023. It's surrounded by Academy, Walker, Park, and Walnut streets and is packed with spots to wander: the Academy Pavilion & Plaza, The Bark Bar, Barkyard, Frantz Square, the Gathering House and Garden, the Great Lawn & Pavilion, Market 317, The Nest, the Park Street Courts, a skywalk, and a tiered water feature. The park pulls in around 750,000 visitors a year and hosts more than 750 programs, so it's a busy place even when there isn't a festival on.

CAFA, the organization behind the festival, is the largest Chinese-American group in North Carolina and has been running since 1996, focusing on cultural diversity and civic engagement rather than politics. Jianping Yang, who's been chair of the board since 2021, also directs the festival. The event has been running since 2018, and every edition since then has drawn more than 20,000 people, with the biggest ones pushing 30,000. Past years have left a lot of people talking about the food — things like squid, chicken legs, chicken feet, and the mouth-watering Kou Shui Ji, and the Jianbing guozi, a crispy egg dish that gets a slight green tint from mung bean and a brush of sauce. There's also a strong community side to it: a Fayetteville couple once came for the costumes and walked away with nearly 800 photos, a 70-year-old named Ellen has been dancing with a Yangko folk group since she was five or six, and a Raleigh couple brought their two young kids just to expose them to Mandarin.

This year's edition is adding a professional Marley dance floor to give the dance performances a better surface to work on. The festival also keeps a wide circle of partners, from local Chinese schools and student associations to Asian-American leadership and business groups, and it's regularly covered by WRAL, CBS 17 and other outlets. WRAL anchor Renee Chou has hosted the festival for several years running. If you have questions before you go, you can reach the organizers at (919) 395-8847 or tasteofchina@nccafa.org, and the official site is tasteofchina.org.