in Food & Drink, History | July 14th, 2026 Leave a Comment

This past spring, the old­est con­tin­u­ous­ly oper­at­ed fam­i­ly-owned Chi­nese restau­rant in the Unit­ed States served its last plate of chop suey. Pekin Noo­dle Par­lor had been an insti­tu­tion in Butte, Mon­tana’s Chi­na­town since 1911, long out­last­ing the town’s gold-rush boom, but accord­ing to its final, fifth-gen­er­a­tion own­er, it could­n’t sur­vive chang­ing atti­tudes toward din­ing out in the twen­ty-twen­ties. Whether or not COVID-influ­enced habits or deliv­ery-app addic­tion are to blame, the Pekin’s clo­sure con­sti­tut­ed an occa­sion to reflect on the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can Chi­nese food, and its rapid evo­lu­tion into a dis­tinct cui­sine unto itself.

Take chop suey, which was adver­tised on the Pekin’s neon sign in let­ter­ing larg­er than the name of the restau­rant itself. Often cit­ed as an ear­ly “Chi­nese” dish actu­al­ly invent­ed by Chi­nese immi­grants in the Unit­ed States, it may have a cer­tain basis in the tsap seui eat­en in Guang­dong province from which many of them had come.

But even there, it amount­ed to a tech­nique for throw­ing togeth­er a hodge­podge of left­overs in a palat­able man­ner; only with its Amer­i­can­iza­tion did it acquire a dis­tinct set of fla­vors and tex­tures. A sim­i­lar process seems to have pro­duced Gen­er­al Tso’s chick­en, broc­coli beef, lo mein, and all the oth­er dish­es that the movies have con­vinced the world Amer­i­cans eat direct­ly from wire-han­dled paper box­es.