2025 On Havana Street Lunar New Years Celebration 1/26/25

The event had both an indoors and outdoors section to it. When you first walked in you were given a free pack of ramen. On the inside there were vendors selling everything from desserts to 3D printed items to Lunar New Year goods. There were also a couple of companies giving out free goodies to advertise their businesses. Labubus could even be found for $50, but I wasn't sure if they were knock offs or not. The high price does not guarantee that they were not knock offs and the place selling them I have actually bought knock off products from them for my con knock of panel. I just do not know enough about Labubus at the time of this writing to day if the ones they had were real or not.

Their opening act this year was Miki Saito performing on a traditional Japanese flute. Many of the songs were from either animes or video games.

People were not really focusing on her performance. A few people I did see make big twitches when she hit the high notes and one guy even covered his ears. I think the had the mic up too high and were not switching the sound levels between when she was talking and when she was playing.

I personally enjoyed her performance.

Upstairs they had a kid section and some additional vendors. They were also trying to advertise a charity that supports the event.

They had cute paper dragons you could put together.

Most of the food options were outside and their was a diversity of prices and quality.

This vendor had ube products that of course I could not pass up trying.

For $7 you could get an ube had pie. I will say that the price to quality ratio of this one was totally off. There was hardly any ube flavor. The problem of this was caused because the inside had two different creams/custards in it. One ube and one plain. I think the product would have been better if they would have just used the ube filling. Then the size was the same size as the box hand pies that you can find everywhere from $1.25 to $3. Since there wasn't really any ube flavor there was no reason to up charge $4 for a lack luster product. It was also very dry.

The ube butter mochi bars was the opposite experience. They had a good ube flavor and the right amount of chewyness. 

The other thing I tried I had been wanting to try since the summer night markets were the tea eggs from 10 Seconds Yunnan. They are a good restaurant on Havana street, but when they were at the Night Market they never had the eggs ready even though they advertised them.

This time they actually had the eggs ready. I had been hoping that they would be a nice flavor bomb like ramen eggs, but once cracked open they were just eggs with no special flavor. Since this was my first time trying a tea egg I do not know if this was a good representation of what one should be like. It has given me the inspiration to try and make my own version of tea eggs. When I do I will share it on the YouTube channel.

For a $1.75 it was ok and was a good protein snack.

Not a lot of people were doing things outside because of how cold it was. The sun did eventually come out, but we were leaving at that point. I think that this year the event just didn't have the same feel as last year due to the weather. It was ok.