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Panda Express
Panda Express opened its first location in 1983 in Glendale, California, founded by Andrew and Peggy Cherng, building on their earlier Panda Inn restaurant to create a fast-casual format specifically designed for shopping mall food courts, an entirely new distribution channel for Chinese-American food at the time. The chain built its menu around American-adapted Chinese dishes rather than regionally authentic Chinese cuisine, with Orange Chicken — developed by chef Andy Kao specifically for the chain in the early 1990s — becoming its single best-selling dish and one of the most recognized Chinese-American fast-food items in the entire country. Panda Express grew into the largest Asian-cuisine restaurant chain in the United States by number of locations, remaining privately held by the Cherng family throughout its growth rather than going public, a genuine rarity for a chain of its scale operating in the highly competitive fast-casual segment. Panda Express's combination of pioneering the mall-food-court Chinese-American fast-food format and its Orange Chicken becoming a genuinely nationally recognized dish in its own right has made it the single most commercially significant Chinese restaurant chain in American history by sheer scale and reach.
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House of Nanking
House of Nanking opened in 1988 in San Francisco's Chinatown, founded by Peter Fang, and the small, unassuming restaurant became known for a genuinely idiosyncratic house style — a spicy, garlicky approach to Shanghainese-influenced dishes that diverged noticeably from the more standard Cantonese-American food found at many neighboring Chinatown restaurants. The restaurant built a reputation for a somewhat unusual dining format in which servers frequently recommended or directly chose dishes for tables rather than relying purely on customers ordering off the printed menu, an approach some diners found charmingly direct and others found presumptuous, but one that became part of the restaurant's specific identity. House of Nanking drew celebrity visitors and extensive media coverage over the decades specifically because of that combination of bold, personal cooking style and its cramped, no-frills dining room, a contrast that became part of the restaurant's broader appeal as an authentic-feeling alternative to more polished Chinese restaurants elsewhere in the city. House of Nanking's combination of Peter Fang's distinctive, spicy Shanghainese-influenced cooking and its unusual server-directed ordering format has made it one of the most singularly personality-driven Chinese restaurants anywhere in the country.
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