Taste of China Festival

Chinese food and culture in Downtown Cary Park, free to enter with food sold on site.

Chinese cooking is not one cuisine, and a festival is one of the few places you can see that laid out side by side. Sichuan, Cantonese, northern wheat-based cooking and regional street food are meaningfully different traditions, and the stalls at an event like this generally represent several of them.

What is on:

• Food stalls across regional styles
• Cooking demonstrations
• Cultural performance, music and dance
• Craft and calligraphy
• Activities for children

How to eat it:

• Walk the full circuit before committing
• Ask which region a stall is cooking from. Most will happily tell you.
• Split dishes between people rather than buying one each
• Bring cash as well as cards

Downtown Cary Park is a good venue for a food festival specifically because it has real seating and shade built in, rather than expecting everyone to eat standing up. With a six-hour window and a November date, the middle of the day is the warm part.

Free to enter.

November timing helps this one. The stalls are cooking hot food into cool air rather than fighting the heat, and the park is comfortable to stand around in for a couple of hours. Go at the start if you want to watch the cooking demonstrations properly rather than over shoulders.