Chinese Food in America: A Brief History

Cao Chiung-Tung was a Hunanese military leader during the Qing Dynasty. He led several successful military campaigns, but today, most people know him for a chicken dish involving nuggets of fried meat coated in a sweet and spicy sauce. Though General Cao's chicken was named after Cao, he didn't invent it. In fact, when Chef Peng Cheng-Kwai developed an early version of the recipe in Taiwan around 1955, Cao had already been dead for 70 years. Peng named the dish after the war hero because they both hailed from Hunan and never caught on there, but today you can find General Cao's chicken on thousands of menus across North America. Why are so many Chinese food dishes more at home in strip malls abroad than they are in China? What does Chinese food even mean for a country so vast and culinarily diverse? Open your takeout containers and break apart your disposable chopsticks. Today, we're digging into the cuisine of the Chinese diaspora, from the birth of Chinese food in America to a new generation of immigrants who are re-evaluating what Chinese food outside I'm Justin Dot. Welcome to Food History. Do you know what the fourth most populous city in China is? It's got about a millennium of history and more people living in it than New York City, so you might think it'd be common knowledge. The answer is Tianjin, but don't feel too bad if that didn't immediately spring to mind. I had to look it up too. Or maybe we should both feel bad. Let's just all buy almanacs. The cuisine of Tianjin is renowned in China. It boasts of famous banquet dishes like the Eight Great Bowls and humbler-yet-still-beloved snacks like gubuli baozi, a type of stuffed steam bun with the name translating to something like even dogs will not pay attention to it. As a port city, seafood plays a prominent part in Tianjin's food scene. There are also long-standing influences from European cuisine thanks to a treaty foisted on the region in the aftermath of the Opium Wars more than 150 years ago. I'll venture a guess that most people living outside of China have never thought about Tianjin cuisine, with the obvious exception of some Chinese immigrants and a hat-tip to the food writer Robert Sietzma, who did profile the growing number of New York restaurants representing Tianjin in a piece that we've linked to below. It would probably seem strange to an American to lump bagels, barbecue, and lobster rolls into one big American food bucket, and yet that's often how we approach the food of a country with more than four times our population. Jason Wang is the owner and operator of Xian Famous Foods, a restaurant chain based in In building their company, Jason and his father were faced with the question of how much to adapt the cuisine of Xi'an to suit American palates. Originally, when the restaurant was founded, it was all about feeding fellow immigrants. It wasn't about feeding everyone, even though anyone is welcome to eat, but for my father it was more about his homesickness from our hometown, Xi'an, and just wanting to recreate that experience for himself and also to share it with fellow immigrants like himself. So that's really his motivation, his passion. Of course, that passion sort of changed over the years since I joined in 2009. It was more of sharing this food with everyone because when foodies such as the late Anthony Bourdain went to our restaurant, it really opened everyone's eyes to this type of food and that opened our eyes to the possibility of our food being acceptable to people from all walks of life. When we say Chinese food here in the West, we're usually talking about products of Chinese immigrants tailoring their cooking to suit local palates. General Tsao's chicken is the perfect example. The dish's inventor had been a chef for the Chinese Nationalist government, and he fled to Taiwan with his employers following the Communist Revolution in 1949. The original General Tsao's chicken Peng cooked six years later borrowed heavily from his Hunanese roots. He described the recipe as heavy, sour, hot, and salty—all flavors characteristic of This early General Tsao's wasn't fried, and it was sometimes served on the bone instead of cut into bite-sized chunks. It bore only a superficial resemblance to the sticky, sweet concoction that's served in American Chinese restaurants today. That version didn't hit menus until the 1970s. That's when, according to the most popular story, Chinese-American chef Sun Ting Wang began serving his take on General Tsao's chicken at the trendy Hunan restaurant in New York City. His recipe was directly inspired by a visit he took to Peng's restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan. He wanted to introduce Peng's famous chicken to the U.S., and he had some ideas for how to make it his own. By frying the meat in batter and drenching it in a sweet, sticky sauce, he was able to adapt the dish to America's idea of Chinese cuisine. People loved his Americanized General Tsao's chicken—well, most of them did. One person who was quite irritated by the dish was Peng. He opened his own New York City restaurant in 1973 and wasn't thrilled to find that diners had already fallen in love with a bastardized version of his specialty. His authentic chicken dish didn't stand a chance against the sweet and crispy variety in the U.S., and he was forced to adapt his recipe to be closer to Wang's version. Though, I will point out that some versions of the story have Peng himself taking the initiative in adapting the dish without interference from Wang. General Tsao's chicken has its roots in Hunan, but most American Chinese food originates from a different part of the country. The Guangdong province, formerly known as Canton, is located on China's southeastern coast. By the mid-19th century, wars and economic crises plaguing the region had pushed many immigrants to search for better lives elsewhere. Thousands of them ended up in California with dreams of striking gold. California's gold rush wasn't as lucrative as those immigrants may have been led to believe, and the situation was made worse by discriminatory taxes and unwelcoming and, indeed, sometimes violent locals. Still, many transplants eventually found success as business owners. Opening a restaurant became a fairly common career choice. The majority of Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. were single men who didn't necessarily know how to cook for themselves. This created a market for Cantonese restaurants that could offer an affordable meal and reminder of home. As the years went on, in the largest Chinese-American communities, like San Francisco's Chinatown, these establishments served authentic fare that catered exclusively to immigrants. Chinese restaurants in smaller towns didn't have that luxury and had to find ways to appeal to local tastes as well. They also lacked access to Chinese products and were forced to replace familiar ingredients with whatever was available. This led to American-Chinese food that wasn't exactly faithful to Cantonese cuisine but still felt novel to American diners. The food that best captured this era is probably chop suey. The name comes from the Cantonese chap suey, which roughly translates to mixed bits. Recipes vary, but today the dish is generally a mixture of meat, eggs, beansprouts, and other vegetables stir-fried in a thick sauce. Chop suey is the dish that kicked off non-Chinese Americans' love affair with Chinese food. In the late 19th century, it became the favorite meal of poor white artists living in New York City. New York's creative types were known to seek out immigrant-run restaurants that were affordable and outside the mainstream. In the 1880s, a lawyer of reportedly bohemian tendencies invited journalist Alan Foreman to a meal in Chinatown. Foreman described the chop suey they ate there as Foreman wrote in his article, Proto-foodies were soon telling everyone they knew about this little-known, 4,000-year-old cuisine they had just discovered. Chinese restaurant owners welcomed the new business. These establishments became trendy places to eat, and chop suey was the hottest dish on the menu. It was so popular that many Chinese-American restaurants at the turn of the 20th century were known as chop suey houses. Despite the acceptance of Chinese food into the broader culture, racism against Chinese immigrants was still prevalent in America. Ironically, anti-Chinese xenophobia contributed to the Chinese restaurant boom of this period. The U.S. government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, barring Chinese laborers from immigrating to the country and residents from becoming citizens. The law impacted a huge number of Chinese immigrants working as farmers, miners, railroad and factory workers—all jobs considered laborers. There was a loophole, however. Some Chinese business owners were eligible for merchant visas created as part of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This gave them permission to travel to and from China and sponsor employees from their home country. In 1915, restaurants became one of the few businesses that qualified Chinese entrepreneurs for merchant visas. Working in the restaurant industry was suddenly one of the only legal ways to live in the U.S. as a Chinese immigrant while having the freedom to visit home, and the Chinese restaurant industry exploded in America as a result. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of Chinese restaurants in New York City quadrupled. The major catch was that restaurants had to be high-grade to win approval from the Immigration Bureau. Chinese restaurant owners were quick to adapt, transforming their chop suey houses into chop suey palaces, with gilded moldings and other nods to fine dining. With the Chinese restaurant boom came the invention of many Chinese dishes on American soil. Modern egg rolls likely appeared in New York City restaurants in the 1930s. The American egg roll has a thicker skin and is substantially bigger than Chinese spring rolls. Beef and broccoli was born out of resourcefulness. While the stir-fry of beef and vegetables would have been right at home on a Cantonese dinner table, it would have looked a little different than what you usually see here in the States. The traditional version of the dish uses gai lan, or Chinese broccoli. The item wasn't easy to find in the U.S., so chefs swapped it for a different green vegetable that was readily available at local markets. Chinese-American Kung Pao chicken is another product of compromise. The recipe originates in China's Sichuan province. There, the Sichuan peppercorns and gongbaoji ding give the chicken dish a spicy, mouth-numbing quality known as ma la. Sichuan peppercorns were outlawed in the U.S. from 1968 to 2005 because they were potential carriers of a disease called canker. While not dangerous to humans, it was considered a danger to citrus trees at the time. That meant Chinese-American chefs in the late 20th century had to get creative when adapting gongbaoji ding. Their take on the dish was much less spicy, with bell peppers and a slightly sweet sauce. Not long after the peppercorn ban went into effect, Richard Nixon made his historic 1972 visit to China. The trip marked the first time a United States president stepped foot in the People's Republic of China since the country was founded in 1949, and it sparked a new fascination with Chinese culture in the States. The American public was suddenly interested in trying Chinese cuisine beyond the westernized Cantonese food they knew, and Sichuan fare rose in popularity. This in turn helped make Kung Pao chicken a Chinese menu mainstay in the U.S., even amongst restaurateurs hailing from different regions of China. Modern American Chinese food came from Chinese cooks of different backgrounds borrowing dishes from their competitors and perfecting them. This is how crab rangoon ended up in Chinese restaurants even though the dish wasn't invented in one. Victor Bergeron conceived the appetizer, consisting of fried wontons stuffed with crab or imitation crab meat, and cream cheese, for his American tiki bar chain Trader Vic's in the 1940s. Trader Vic's food and aesthetic emulated the American public's fairly uninformed idea of Polynesian culture while sharing few similarities with that part of the world. Instead of drawing inspiration from Polynesian cuisine, the chain's founder invented new cocktails and dishes from scratch that would feel vaguely exotic to his American clientele. Sometimes it worked. Trader Vic's was probably the birthplace of now-classic tiki cocktails like the Mai Tai, a mixture of rum, lime, hors d'oeuvres, orange curacao, and simple syrup. The food offerings diverged from the cocktail menu's tropical island theme. A Chinese-American bar back at Trader Vic's named Joe Young influenced the restaurant's cuisine, which is why the food skewed more Chinese than Polynesian. According to Victor Bergeron's granddaughter Eve, Trader Vic came up with crab rangoon while experimenting with wonton wrappers in the 1940s. Even by the standards of American Chinese food at the time, the recipe stretched any ties it had to Chinese cuisine. Even the name betrayed its confused identity. At the time, rangoon was the name of present-day Yangon in Myanmar, which has nothing to do with China, Polynesia, or cream cheese. Crab Philadelphia would have been a more appropriate title. Despite all this, crab rangoon was a hit with Trader Vic's customers. The cream cheese and crab dumpling was so popular that it spread beyond the chain and ended up on Chinese restaurant menus across the country, where it remains today. How much have the intervening years changed the landscape for Chinese food here in the States? As part of a new generation of Chinese-American restaurateurs, Jason Wang has a unique perspective. The influence of Chinese cuisine outside of China isn't limited to the U.S. As I covered in our episode on ramen, the noodle soup comes from the alkaline Lamian noodles that Chinese immigrants brought to the country. It's believed that Chinese cooks in Japan first had the idea to serve the noodles in a salty broth with pork, fish cake, and nori seaweed in the year 1910. In India, Kolkata is famous for its Indian Chinese food. Hakka Chinese traders traveled to the city in the late 18th century and brought their cooking with them. Centuries later, India is home to Chinese-inspired dishes like Manchurian, which consists of fried chicken or vegetables in a sweet and sour sauce. India also has Szechuan sauce, made from shallots, garlic, and dried chilies instead of Szechuan peppercorns. Australia is home to a brand of Chinese food all its own. A major wave of Chinese migrants came to the country in the mid-19th century to work in the cookhouses that serviced the goldfields. This is where the cuisine first changed to suit Anglo-Australian tastes. Today, Chinese restaurants down under serve many foods that are nearly unique to the country, including lemon chicken, mango pancakes, and ham and chicken rolls. Maybe these dishes weren't an authentic representation of Chinese food when they first appeared, but surely they're an authentic part of the story of China and its people. I'll give the last word to Jason. There's nothing wrong with a little beef and broccoli, chinosauce chicken, shrimp with lobster sauce every now and then. There's always a place for Americanized Chinese food. But for our food from Xi'an, we have these strong flavors. We use a lot of different spices that people don't think are usually in Chinese food, like cumin, cardamom. It's really different than what people expect. Authenticity for me is about paying respects to the origins of the food, the culture of the food. It's not as if everything has to stay exactly the same. My father and I, we're different in many ways. We do things differently when operating the business. We think about things differently. We talk differently. But there is one thing we agree on, and that is food is a universal language. Food should be enjoyed by everyone. There should be no barriers when it comes to enjoying food. Our store is authentic to us because we're an American business serving Chinese food in New York City, so that's very authentic as well. So the word authenticity, I think it's about an identity and homage and giving honor to that with every dish that you serve.