Chinese restaurants are among the oldest eating establishments in the United States. For centuries, Chinese immigrants settling in the U.S. brought with them the rich culinary traditions of their birthplace. As journalist Jennifer 8. Lee reminds us, Chinese restaurants today outnumber classic fast food chains like McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and are an essential part of American cuisine. Many dishes, such as General Tso’s Chicken and chop suey, are representative of how migration transformed traditional Chinese dishes into new classics.
Yet Chinese restaurants are more than just purveyors of food; they are the site of historic legal battles over the right for Chinese immigrants to become Americans. One of the leading scholars on Chinese restaurants in the United States is University of California Davis law professor Gabriel Jack Chin. Chin has written extensively on the history of Chinese restaurants in the United States and how these businesses faced legal persecution from anti-Chinese politicians in California. Recently, Chin has gained recognition for his discovery of the Chicago Café in Woodland, California as the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the United States. Here we discuss his research on Chinese restaurants and his thoughts on Chinese American cuisine today. Take a look:
International Examiner: Thank you for agreeing to this interview! You have been writing about the history of Chinese restaurants in the U.S. for several years. When did you first become interested in the history of restaurants?
Gabriel Jack Chin: I have always been interested in restaurants. First, I love food, and I think Chinese food is one of the great cuisines of the world. It was also clear to me that Chinese restaurants had a very important function in American and Asian American culture. Everywhere you go, there are Chinese restaurants, from big cities to towns on the prairie. There are so many kinds of Chinese restaurants, from white tablecloth joints with tuxedoed servers, to take-out storefronts where the employees cook behind bulletproof shields, to grocery stores where there is a counter where someone is making dumplings, noodles, and rice. And you meet so many Chinese Americans who grew up, or whose parents grew up, in their parents’ restaurants. My own grandmother Lilac Quan Chin was a cook and manager for much of her life. The opportunity to run a Chinese restaurant gave many parents the opportunity to educate their children and give them the chance to live the American dream.
IE: You wrote for the Duke Law Journal in 2018 about the “War Against Chinese Restaurants.” Was there a moment when you started viewing these restaurants as sites for legal battles regarding Chinese immigrants?
GJC: Yes. As I said, I always had a personal and cultural interest in Chinese restaurants, but I am a lawyer and legal scholar who works on legal topics, like immigration and criminal law. But I learned to my surprise, doing brute force research on computer databases, that Chinese restaurants were a key location for those opposed to the presence of Chinese in the United States to use the law to target them. This was an aspect of U.S. race-law that I had never heard of, and I could find no one else who had written about it. Yet, it should have been no surprise, because in the bad old days, the law was often used for racial purposes. Indian land was taken away, and African Americans were first enslaved, and then after the Civil War, subjected to various forms of brutal segregation. There is no logical reason that Asians should have been exempt. Chinese and other Asians were excluded from immigrating to the United States, and if they were here, denied the ability to participate in society. In addition to denying Asians the right to naturalize, we see many forms of economic and social discrimination—laws targeting Chinese laundries, denying Asians the right to own land, prohibiting acquisition of naturalized citizenship, banning marriage to White people. Thus, I should not have been surprised when I saw other methods and techniques of discrimination against Asians, such as in the restaurant business, and, as I wrote in another paper, in working as fishers and sailors.
Discrimination against Chinese and other Asian restaurants took many forms. Unions boycotted them. Some cities like Chicago used zoning to restrict them. Police chiefs and other regulators sometimes had policies of denying them business licenses. One of the most fascinating forms of discrimination was an effort to ban white women from working in or patronizing Chinese restaurants after Elsie Sigel, a missionary who was the daughter of a Union Civil War General, was killed by a Chinese restaurant worker in 1909. The AFL urged all states to ban white women from Chinese restaurants, and many states and cities introduced legislation to accomplish that. The laws were found unconstitutional when tested, but they had their desired effect—Congress strengthened anti-Asian immigration laws.
IE: You recently discovered that the Chicago Cafe in Woodland, California (on the outskirts of Sacramento) is the home to the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the U.S. Tell us more about your research process and how you came across this discovery.
GJC: A team of students and consultants and I showed that the Chicago Cafe probably dates to 1903. This would make it the oldest known continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the United States, older than the Pekin Noodle Parlors in Butte, Montana which was previously reputed to be the oldest, and claims to have been founded in 1911. I once drove 10 hours out of my way to visit the Pekin Noodle Parlors, and it was well worth it, it is a fantastic place. (By the way, call the place the “Pekin Noodle Parlors” because that’s the sign on the door, because that’s what it was called in the old newspapers we looked at, and because it still has the original little rooms—parlors—that were once common in Chinese restaurants. They call themselves the Pekin Noodle Parlor now). I found the Chicago Cafe because it is local. Woodland is 10 or 15 minutes from Davis, California, where I teach, and I had eaten there many times. It is a Chinese American diner, where you can get chow mein or a hamburger. After the Pekin Noodle Parlors began getting a lot of publicity a few years ago, I noticed that the Chicago Cafe had signs on the wall and statements on their menus saying “Since 1903,” and I realized that that was before.
IE: Since the IE is based in Seattle, how have Chinese restaurants evolved in cities like Seattle? Is there a noticeable generational gap between old-style restaurants like Tai Tung and newer ones? Have palates changed?
GJC: Tai Tung is one of my favorite restaurants, not only because it has little cubicles, sort of like the Pekin Noodle Parlors and the Chicago Cafe, and not only because it is owned by Quans, but also because of the food. Again, I am not a food scholar per se, but as an eater, I would say that Chinese cuisine has changed dramatically in this country in recent years. There is much more authentic regional cuisine being presented. Given the “Lo Mein Loophole”–Chinese restaurateurs were considered “merchants” and therefore could immigrate even in the exclusion era–there were always recent immigrants working in Chinese restaurants, always new blood interested in the opportunity. But often, a migrant would take over an existing place, and keep running it with the same menu, the same recipes. More recently, chefs from Asia are not serving what has been served in the U.S. in the past, they are serving a version, at least, of what people are eating in Asia now. This is an exciting development. I do think there will always be a place for high-quality traditional restaurants like Tai Tung, but there will not be as many of them as there were before. By the way, I do not look down on “Chinese American” cuisine, or think of it as fake. It is real, authentic Chinese American food, even if it does not match up with what people eat in China. Again, one of the most amazing things to me about Chinese food is that it is not only everywhere in the U.S., but everywhere in the world. In every place I’ve been, at least, the bills of fare make some use or acknowledgement of local tastes. For example, Chinese buffets in Mexico City serve traditional Chinese delicacies like french fries and sushi.
