The Little-Known History Behind Chinese Restaurants in America✎𓂃
And what it taught me about my entrepreneurial lineage
Welcome to day 5 of “literary-moon”: A series where I interview the incredible creatives and artists who contributed to the magic of my recent wedding festivities (both in the SF Bay Area and in Kerala, India).
If you missed the first four stories — they featured Maria-Joy (curator of our wedding gift hampers), Jeremiah de Rozario (my favorite indie singer-songwriter), Arnold Heiden (DJ and founder of Circle Of Artists), and Jasmin Schuler (San Francisco-based wedding photographer).
Today’s story, though, is not like the rest.
It is an homage to Chinese restaurants across the United States, for which there are an estimated 45,000 (more than McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC combined — at least at the time of Jennifer Lee’s release of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles).
Last December, I hosted my Chinese wedding banquet at one of these establishments, and it sparked a curiosity to dig deeper into their ubiquitousness in American cities.
An Homage to Chinese Restaurants
Ever since I was a little girl, I would visit Chinese eateries in the San Francisco Bay Area — either for dim sum with my parents or for a nice meal with extended family.
Especially in the evenings, the larger of these establishments would close off a section from the public, reserved for a traditional wedding banquet.
Picture this: rows of 12-person round tables each decorated in red table cloths layered with porcelain dinnerware and a turntable centerpiece spinning with dishes of fish, pork, seafood, vegetables, and noodles.
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