If you take your sweetie out for dinner on Valentine's Day, you might find yourself sharing restaurant space with lions. This year Valentine's Day - Sunday, February 14 - coincides with the first night of the Chinese New Year, and several Chinese restaurants are rolling out special menus and inviting lion dancers into their dining rooms to celebrate the holiday. Chinese New Year is the best known of the Asian lunar new year celebrations, but several other countries celebrate it as well. Koreans celebrate Seollal, which usually falls on the first day of the Chinese new year. The Vietnamese celebrate Tet. And the lunar new year is also celebrated in Tibet, Mongolia, and in several southeast Asian countries.

Cities with warmer climates have parades and festivals to mark the new year. Here the weather doesn't really lend itself to parades in February, so the celebrations tend to be smaller, but no less enthusiastic. For more than 15 years, the Rochester Shaolin Training Academy has been sending teams of lion dancers out to perform their colorful, noisy, and highly stylized dances in restaurants, schools, and other venues throughout the city. Accompanied by gongs, booming drums, and cymbals, the ornate and even gaudy "lions" (which look more like overgrown and mutated Pekingese dogs) are put through their paces by smiling pink-faced Buddhas using fans and other props to guide the mischievous beasts and keep them from running amusingly amok. The lions are fun, but the special menus are well worth your attention, too.

While there are several places that offer the combination of special menu and entertainment for Chinese New Year, one of the better choices is Golden Dynasty (1900 S Clinton Ave, 442-6340, rochestergoldendynasty.com). For several years I've made it a point to stop there for the special holiday fillet of fish steamed with ginger and red pepper and served over a bed of spinach ($13.95). The stunningly white, buttery fish is wonderfully infused with ginger, with the spinach providing a nice astringent bite to round things out. New to the special menu this year is clay-pot chicken, a stew of thinly sliced chicken, black mushrooms and fungus, mustard greens, and Chinese broccoli cooked in an earthenware pot with a close-fitting lid ($12.95). The minute that lid comes off, the earthy scent of mushrooms and greens, combined with a garlicky perfume and just a bit of oyster sauce, puffs into the air. You'll be tempted to dump rice directly into the pot in order to soak up all rich, caramel-tasting sauce. Golden Dynasty has many things to recommend it, not the least of which are the owner's own mai tais ($4.95). Potent, tangy mixes of rum and fresh fruit juice topped with paper umbrellas and fruit, they are, as our bartender told us, more about the "feeling" than they are about "taste." Only one per customer, please.

Deeper into Henrietta, you can get your lion dance fix at Cantonese House (3159 S Winton Rd, 272-9126). The manager here assured me that his restaurant doesn't have any special menu, but was delighted to take me on a guided tour of a wall full of special dishes he could make for me. Both chicken and fish, preferably whole, are traditional new years dishes, so I ordered a whole deep-fried chicken (head and feet are optional, but apparently popular, $12.95), and a highly recommended "mashed" tofu with golden mushrooms ($11.95). The chicken was incredibly simple: cleaned, patted dry, seasoned and slid into a deep-fryer, emerging with crackling-crisp skin and juicy, sweet flesh. Chopped into chopstick-friendly serving pieces, this and a plate of peashoots sauteed in garlic ($12.95) are all you need for a festive meal; but then you'd be missing out on the tofu. Mashed tofu does not sound like the most promising of dishes, but the version served at Cantonese House is splendid. Mixed balls of tofu, shrimp, and scallions are fried, and then sauteed along with long tangles of nutty-tasting golden mushrooms in a gold-colored sauce with just the right balance of sweetness and salt. This may not be a special holiday menu, but it's certainly special.

The flash and glamour of Chinese New Year may overshadow your other lunar new year options in our city, but they are worth seeking out. Seollal, the Korean New Year, is a sedate affair - a quiet, family-centered holiday compared to the rambunctious celebration of our New Year's Eve. The food that is central to the celebration of Seollal, and to Korean food in general, is rice cake, a thick, dense tube of rice akin to a giant noodle. Rice cake is the star ingredient in tteokguk (pronouced duk-kuk), the traditional beef-based soup eaten on Seollal. At Seoul Garden in Henrietta (2805 W Henrietta Rd, 424-2220), discs of bright, white rice cake float - along with glass noodles, bits of green-black nori, egg, tender shreds of flank, and, depending on your preference, meaty dumplings - in a thick beef broth that warms you from the inside out ($9.95, $10.95 with dumplings). Homey and fortifying, eating the soup is said to grant you another year of life, and it will surely cure you of any cold that might be afflicting you at the moment, particularly if you add a bit of peppery kimchi to it to give it a bit of zip.

Somewhere between the two extremes is Tet. The Vietnamese Tet is three days long, but the first day of the holiday bears a closer resemblance to Seollal than to the Chinese New Year celebrations that we see in our restaurants and the parades in New York and San Francisco. The family stays close to home, gifts are exchanged, and slowly over the next two days the circle of who is included in the festivities widens to include friends, teachers, and eventually the community as a whole. Packets of sticky rice enriched with pork and beans and cooked in banana leaves are a staple of the holiday, as are special desserts, including a wide variety of candies and dou hua, a ginger and tofu "soup."

At Pho Duong Dong (182 Otis St, 254-8120), owner Dieu Pham sets out red, segmented trays of Chinese and Vietnamese sweets for her customers for the holiday. The candies, which include familiar items like peanut brittle and sesame candies (both white and black), are supplemented by less familiar sweets: sticky soft candies made out of ginger, candied lily seeds, dried sugared winter melon, and dried shreds of young coconut, among other things. Equally important, and also free, is dou hua, a dessert somewhere between a sweet soup and a flan. Dou hua can please the most finicky of diners, and satisfy the most difficult to please. A spicy ginger undercurrent complements the custardy texture of the tofu, both conspiring to mute the aggressive sweetness of sugar syrup - perhaps ensuring an exciting and sweet new year with every bite.