Chinese Food Is Supposedly Huge in America. So What Are Americans Actually Eating?

There are more than 45,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, and 80% of them serve "American Chinese food."

Americans' favorite Chinese dish is probably one most Chinese people have never eaten: Orange Chicken.

Panda Express, the largest Chinese restaurant chain in the US, sells 80 million pounds of the chicken that goes into this dish every year — enough for every American to eat four pieces a year, close to what KFC sells in fried chicken in the US (5.5 pieces a person).

The dish is said to be adapted from the Hunan dish chenpi chicken (chicken with dried tangerine peel), but it resembles it in neither taste nor preparation. The dried tangerine peel and other medicinal ingredients used in the Chinese version are replaced in America by fresh orange peel — sometimes not even that, with orange sauce poured straight over the fried chicken, sweet and sour, thick and syrupy. Chenpi chicken tastes savory, fragrant and numbingly spicy, and is never sweet.

The same goes for the other "famous Chinese dishes" popular with Americans — sesame chicken, General Tso's Chicken, Egg Foo Young, kung pao chicken. In taste and in preparation, all of them are thoroughly American.

These outlandish "Chinese dishes" are the mainstream of Chinese food in America. The American restaurant monthly Chinese Restaurant News estimates that there are now more than 45,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, and that 80% of them serve "American Chinese food." Going by Yelp's listings of Chinese restaurants in the US, only the stretch of country from North Dakota to western Texas still counts as a "Chinese restaurant desert."

Chinese food in America isn't authentic, and not because authentic Chinese cooking is hard to make. It isn't authentic because these "Chinese dishes" were built from the start for American diners.

Andrew Cherng, who founded Panda Express, decided at the outset to break with the old Chinatown logic of cooking "for Chinese people to eat." "There just aren't that many Chinese people. If you want to make real money, you have to cater to foreigners' tastes." That decision laid the foundation for the chain's later growth.

Founded in 1983, the brand is now everywhere in America. It started out mostly in shopping malls, then spread into supermarkets, airports, college campuses, highway rest stops, libraries, stadiums and even financial districts. It has more than 2,000 locations worldwide, 90% of them in the US market. (For comparison: McDonald's has 2,500 locations in mainland China; Real Kungfu, the largest Chinese fast-food chain, has only 600.)

Panda Express's revenue reached $2 billion last year, and Orange Chicken alone accounted for a third of sales. Between 2005 and 2015, its share of the entire US fast-food market nearly tripled, to 1.1%.

Simon Zeng, a former Panda Express store chef and assistant manager, puts the company's success down to speed: "If Panda Express weren't this fast, it wouldn't be as successful as it is today." It still opens three new stores a week on average.

Panda Express, built for American tastes, is the Chinese restaurant chain easiest to walk into, and in America it stands for an entire cuisine. "I tend to divide Chinese food in America into three levels — American Chinese food (fast food), authentic Chinese food, and upscale Chinese restaurants," said Ming, a Chinese graduate student at Columbia University. At New York prices, he reckons, the three tiers cost under $10, $20-30, and around $100 a head. Chinese people in the US usually go to the middle one.

The cheapest and the most expensive Chinese restaurants are usually packed with Americans. A Purdue University report found that more than half of Panda Express's customers are white (60.2%), followed by Asian Americans (32%). But the mindset behind their American Chinese food is no different from the one behind Thai or Vietnamese food: this is "American food" under a new name, or, to put it more flatteringly, fusion food.

It recalls the old fable of Lord Ye, who filled his house with pictures of dragons and then fled in terror when a real one turned up. Americans, proud of their multiculturalism, love to try different cuisines, but what actually wins them over is still the taste of "fried" and "sweet-and-sour," with the ingredients bent toward local preferences.

The most common side dish in American Chinese food, for instance, is broccoli, an American specialty, cooked the American way — almost raw. Another famous American Chinese dish, Almond Chicken, plainly owes its existence to America's abundant almond crop. And because seafood is plentiful and cheap in the US, kung pao chicken has sprouted extensions like kung pao shrimp and kung pao scallops.

The upscale Chinese restaurants charging more than $100 a head aim mainly at foreign diners who want something new and are genuinely curious about Chinese food. Here you can find well-made, reasonably reliable Chinese dishes — still on the sweet side, of course.

Yu Hang, a student at Johns Hopkins University, tried the most expensive Chinese restaurant in town, Tony Cheng's Restaurant, soon after arriving in the US. "Seventy to eighty percent of the diners at Tony's are probably foreigners. Then again, I wouldn't often spend more than $100 on Chinese food in America, and the décor here is a bit too old-fashioned."

Old-fashioned décor is one hallmark of upscale Chinese restaurants in America. As part of the "China experience," many of them pile on gilding and green trim, carved beams and painted rafters, and a wall of festive red.

And whatever tier of Chinese restaurant you eat at in America, you get a "fortune cookie" after the meal, with a slip of paper inside telling your fortune for the day or teaching you a Chinese word or two.

The practice is so old that its origins are disputed, and you can find it in plenty of Chinese restaurants in Europe too. Fortune cookies actually came from a Japanese cracker, but to foreign diners they are by now an unmistakable emblem of the Chinese restaurant. Discovering that restaurants in China don't serve them can feel a bit like learning that Chongqing has no jigongbao, the chicken clay-pot dish widely assumed to be a Chongqing specialty.

Americans first tasted Chinese food in the 1880s. In 1896, Li Hongzhang visited the United States, and rumor had it that he ate chop suey at a New York banquet — a stir-fry of sliced meats, offal and vegetables. (He didn't.) That story, along with page after page of newspaper coverage of wars between China and other countries, stirred American curiosity about China and Chinese food. Chop suey became a "famous Chinese dish" overnight.

Chinese food truly took off in America after Nixon visited China in 1972. Millions of Americans watched live on television as China held a banquet for him, the table laid with Peking duck, shark fin soup and other dishes that looked wonderful and about which they knew nothing at all. After that, Chinese restaurants became one of the most popular places to eat in America.

But this authentic Chinese food never flourished in America. The people who carried Chinese food across the Pacific were mostly first-generation laborer immigrants — or, more precisely, it was they who created "American Chinese cuisine," Chinese fast food with American characteristics. Many of them had never trained as chefs, but the restaurant business was easy to enter, so most of them entered it.

This cuisine was not born to spread a food culture. It existed to give fellow immigrants familiar food. It was a matter of survival.

Against that background, "cheap," "low-grade ingredients" and "dirty, noisy dining rooms" became, for a time, what Chinese food meant to Americans. A Chinese immigrant once described this muddled "American Chinese food" on a forum: "America's tens of thousands of small Chinese restaurants are basically the American version of Shaxian Snacks, China's ubiquitous budget canteen chain — low-end positioning, cheap prices, enormous numbers of stores, and a strikingly uniform style, all singing the same hymn of loyalty."

Washington Post reporter Roberto A. Ferdman described the American attitude to Chinese food this way: "There are almost 50,000 Chinese restaurants in America, and yet most of us still aren't willing to pay more than $10 for Chinese food."

Krishnendu Ray, a food sociologist at New York University, once used three decades of restaurant price data from Zagat, the US restaurant review company owned by Google, to compare price changes across 14 restaurant categories. French food held first place throughout. Chinese food actually slipped one spot between 1987 and 2014, to 12th — always a category Americans are reluctant to spend much on. Revenue in the US Chinese restaurant business also runs 40% below the average for the restaurant industry as a whole.

Ordering delivery is how Americans eat Chinese food most often, which says something about how low Chinese food sits.

According to data the restaurant-industry site Eater obtained from the delivery platforms GrubHub and DoorDash, Chinese food ranks second among "Americans' favorite delivery foods," behind only chicken. From Friends in the old days to The Big Bang Theory now, you can often see American sitcom leads eating Chinese takeout out of a rectangular box. By region, Chinese food is the top delivery choice in six states.

Yong Chen, a University of California professor who studies Chinese food in America, blames the low prices on why Americans eat it in the first place: to satisfy a need for food service, not to celebrate China's long and rich culinary tradition. "Most Chinese food is seen as convenient, cheap food. Until American society fundamentally changes how it sees Chinese people and Chinese culture, Chinese food won't get the recognition and praise it deserves."

Will Chinese food in America get better? The outlook is fairly optimistic.

The path Italian food took may be worth looking at. Between 1880 and 1924, large numbers of poor southern Italians emigrated to America, and Italian food's standing sank with them; Italians were often mocked as "garlic lovers." As Italian immigrants rose in American society, the value of Italian food was gradually taken seriously, and mac and cheese eventually turned up on fine-dining menus alongside lobster and truffle.

Japanese cuisine, by contrast, has always held a high position — and a high price — in America. Beyond the cost of ingredients like sashimi, the Japanese insistence on perfection in both cooking and the cleanliness of the dining room has won American respect. In 1985 the average price of Japanese food in New York ranked sixth; last year it ranked first. Korean food's average price has climbed sharply too, while Thai, Indian and Mexican food, like Chinese food, have stayed near the bottom.

Research by Krishnendu Ray, an assistant researcher in food studies at New York University, suggests the food world may have a global hierarchy of its own: a country's prestige and economic standing shape how American diners regard its cuisine.

China's economic growth has been remarkable, yet Chinese food in America is still seen as cheap. As noted above, the bias against Chinese immigrants and the working-class cuisine they created runs deep, and will take time to fade.

But all of this could change quickly. American taste in Chinese food is shifting from "what tastes good to Americans" toward "authentic Chinese food." Today, whether in Chinese restaurant rankings or in Yelp reviews of the more formal places, the test of a restaurant is often whether its dishes taste the way they do where they come from.

One reason is that younger consumers have a higher tolerance for unfamiliar flavors and are genuinely willing to try "authentic Chinese food." (Whatever market shift you are discussing, this factor seems to apply.) A survey by the consultancy Hartman Group found that 10% to 20% fewer millennials than the previous generation are interested in classic American food and Americanized foreign food.

Yu Hang once took a white classmate to a local Cantonese restaurant, after she asked him out of the blue, "What do you think of the Chinese food in DC? Is it authentic?" Having tasted roast duck and roast goose made the traditional way, she raved about them — "though of course, she said it would be even better if it were a bit sweeter."

Chinese food varies widely across America. On the whole, good food culture follows people. In California, New York and other big metropolitan areas where Chinese residents are densest, Chinese restaurants are more numerous, better and more reasonably priced.

"A Sichuan meal in Detroit costs $40-50, and the taste and the room are exactly the same as in New York — and you know Detroit's economy isn't doing well," Ming, the Chinese student, told QDaily. Half that money gets him a very good meal at the Sichuan place downstairs from his New York apartment. Ming recently visited a friend in Michigan and found only a Panda Express there; reaching a decent Chinese restaurant meant a 40-minute drive. "Uh, my friend probably only goes once or twice a month."

Prices vary by regional cuisine too. In New York, Sichuan, Cantonese and Shanghainese food have reached critical mass, and competition keeps prices from climbing too high. Northern dishes such as lamb-spine hotpot are the newcomers: fewer restaurants, and the highest prices.

In megacities like New York and Los Angeles, competition among Chinese restaurants has moved past price.

"As far as I know, Little Sheep's location in Flushing [the Asian immigrant enclave in New York] has already closed, because there are just too many hotpot options now," Ming said, and he expected it. "For example, once Gong Cha opened in New York, the knock-on effect was that fewer people went to CoCo. And if HEYTEA opens here too, nobody will go to Gong Cha anymore."

One of the first Chinese restaurant chains to go abroad, Little Sheep entered the US market back in 2003. The veteran hotpot chain currently has a notice on its website: "In order to provide our valued customers with a more comfortable dining environment, the Little Sheep Flushing location will be closed for renovation…"

But for chains like Little Sheep, the vast American market is still full of opportunity. Washington, DC, one of the "four big East Coast cities" along with New York, has roughly one-eighth as many Chinese residents as New York. This Mid-Autumn Festival, Yu Hang, who studies in DC, went with all the Chinese students in his school to Little Sheep for a reunion dinner. "It was very basic hotpot, with only a few simple sauces, and honestly I don't even remember how it tasted — but eating it, I felt moved."

To Besha Rodell, a food critic in Los Angeles, restaurant chains arriving from China matter a great deal in changing how Americans see Chinese food. In recent years more and more brands have announced plans for the American market — Haidilao, Meizhou Dongpo and others have opened stores there one after another, largely keeping the décor and menus they use at home, which is already enough to set them apart from the Chinese restaurants America is used to.

Yang Mingyu Huangmenji Mifan, the braised-chicken-rice chain with 6,000 locations in China, has also opened its first US branch, in Tustin, California. Next month, the creative Chinese restaurant brand Da Dong opens its first New York location, and Ming has already arranged with friends to be among the first through the door. "I heard Da Dong was coming last year!"

On the West Coast, where the Chinese population is denser, the change has already arrived. "American Chinese food and Chinese food are two completely different things," said Rick Song, who works in Silicon Valley. An American-born descendant of Chinese immigrants, he flies back to China to see family almost every year and knows exactly what real Chinese food tastes like. He reached for an American comparison: "It's like McDonald's and a real hamburger. They might be similar in some ways, but they're actually completely different. The former… is just junk food!"

Asked whether his white colleagues can tell the two apart, Rick Song shrugged it off. "In the Bay Area, everyone knows they're not the same thing."

"Hmm, I don't think they can necessarily tell. Put yourself in their shoes — can you tell whether Southeast Asian food is authentic? The spices it uses may already have been completely reworked. To foreigners, sweet-and-sour pork and Orange Chicken might taste like the same thing," Ming said.

Still, Krishnendu Ray predicts that if China keeps growing at this pace for the next 20 years and the number of low-income immigrants falls, American ideas about Chinese food may shift a great deal. According to the US research organization Pew Research, the Chinese American population was 2.865 million in 2000; by 2015 it had grown to 4.948 million. The image of Chinese food in American eyes could change dramatically.

Upscale Chinese restaurants born in America are slowly multiplying. Compared with the traditional American Chinese restaurant, their rooms are more modern and stylish and their dishes more faithful, and they no longer cluster in Chinese enclaves like Chinatown or Flushing.

The Tang, in Manhattan, is one of them. Eric Sze, one of its co-founders, is unhappy with how cheap Chinese food is in America. "Chinese food shouldn't be this cheap anymore." The Tang looks a little like a Starbucks, except for the murals of Beijing hutongs on the walls. Its ZJM — zhajiangmian, noodles in soybean paste — costs $12, more than any bowl of zhajiangmian in Flushing.

Even Panda Express, the emblem of American Chinese food, is changing its style. In 2014 it launched an innovation lab and has since added more Chinese-looking items to the menu — scallion pancake wraps, bubble tea — hoping one of them becomes the next Orange Chicken.

Cover image: Unsplash, The Big Bang Theory