When was the last time a thousand people helped celebrate your birthday? For at least one woman in Taiwan, that happened when she turned 90. Her family organized a street banquet right outside their home, and a thousand people attended the celebratory meal, including Vancouverite Charlie Wu. The managing director of the Asian-Canadian Special Events Association remembers attending many street banquets while growing up in Taiwan. These large-scale parties are used to mark not only birthdays, but anniversaries, weddings, and business openings as well.

“You want to bring people within your community to come and celebrate that occasion,” Wu tells the Georgia Straight by phone from his Vancouver office. “The best place to do it is right outside your house or business, so that’s why it’s on the street.”

The ACSEA is organizing the Vancouver 125 Banquet, the city’s first street banquet, which will take place during Telus TaiwanFest. The three-day festival, which celebrates Taiwanese arts and culture, is happening from Saturday to Monday (September 3 to 5) in the 600 to 800 blocks of Granville Street and on the Vancouver Art Gallery plaza (801 West Georgia Street). Some events will also take place at the Roundhouse Community Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews).

“It’s a perfect way to appreciate the history of Vancouver 125 but in a Taiwanese style,” Wu says.

Similar to daylong street banquets in Taiwan, Vancouver’s street banquet will be open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on all festival days. The banquet area will be enclosed and include round tables and 125 plastic stools for diners.

“They’re the type of stools that people use in Taiwan, so people will get a taste of what a street banquet is really like,” Wu says.

Four Vancouver-based Taiwanese associations will be creating 16 dishes for the event. The Vancouver Taiwan Hakka Association will showcase four dishes representing the Hakka people of Taiwan, who are descendants of Guangdong immigrants and make up 20 percent of Taiwan’s population. Hakka cooking is often centred on the texture of dishes, particularly meat, and the Hakka people’s connection to agriculture.

“Hakka people are known for their thrifty and hard-working lifestyle,” Wu says. “They grow their own vegetables and then they’ll go to the creek to get a fish, so a lot of ingredients are picked from their own local surroundings.”

Along with Hakka-style flat noodles and stir-fried squid, the VTHA is making both sweet and salty sticky rice balls, which Wu says represent the union of families “because of the stickiness”. While sweet rice balls are eaten for dessert, salty rice balls are cooked in a vegetable and mushroom broth and often served as a main dish.

Meanwhile, the century-old Chinese Benevolent Association of Vancouver will be contributing dishes that represent Taiwan’s veterans’ village, which started in 1949 after Nationalist party leader Chiang Kai-shek moved a large group of military personnel and their families to Taiwan.

“They came from 35 different provinces in China, so in a way, it has different cultures fused together in one village,” Wu says. “It has its own significance in Taiwanese culture today.”

Wu explains that because of military travel, people from the veterans’ village did not have proper kitchens, so many of their recipes were simple and flour-based, such as noodles, dumplings, and pastries. This is represented in two of the CBAV’s dishes: pan-fried wrap with minced beef, which is a crepe-style beef wrap flavoured with sweet and savoury sauces, and dumpling in hot sauce, which is a steamed pork dumpling doused in fresh chili, sesame oil, and vinegar. A traditional hot-and-sour soup as well as moo shu pork, made up of thinly sliced and stir-fried pork, egg, bamboo shoots, and mushrooms, will also be served at the banquet.

Diners looking to experience Taiwan’s contemporary culinary scene can try dishes made by the Taiwanese Canadian Cultural Society and the UBC Formosa Reality Club. The TCCS will make a popular Taiwanese street snack called Changhua meatballs, which are more like glutinous-rice-wrapped pork dumplings than Swedish meatballs. Also on the tasting menu is Tainan bamboo sticky rice, which is a steamed rice dish flavoured with bamboo stalks and a soy-sauce-based broth. UBC’s student-run club will be making another Taiwanese street favourite: sausage on a rice bun, a sweet pork sausage stuffed in a “bun” made of sticky rice, garnished with pickles, radishes, garlic, and onions.

“It’s like a hot dog with rice on the outside. The Taiwanese flavour of the sausage is actually quite well-known,” Wu says.

Each item at the Vancouver 125 Banquet will sell for $4 to $5. Wu is hoping that the low prices will enable diners to try several dishes and will encourage families to come and experience the lively event.

“The Taiwanese show their celebration through street banquets,” he says. “You want your friends nearby to come, and you want to invite friends to come, and you make it all day long.”

You can follow Michelle da Silva on Twitter at twitter.com/michdas.