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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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Nom Wah Tea Parlor
Nom Wah Tea Parlor opened in 1920 in Manhattan's Chinatown, making it the oldest continuously operating dim sum restaurant in the entire city, and it's held that same Doyers Street location — on one of the neighborhood's oldest and most crooked streets — for over a century. The restaurant was purchased in 2010 by Wilson Tang, a nephew of the previous longtime owner, who took over specifically to preserve the restaurant's traditional dim sum format — small plates ordered individually from a menu rather than the rolling cart system many other dim sum restaurants use — while gradually modernizing operations without changing the food itself. Nom Wah's egg rolls and shrimp dumplings have become specifically celebrated individual dishes, drawing both longtime Chinatown regulars and a newer generation of diners introduced to the restaurant through extensive food media and documentary coverage of Tang's ownership transition and preservation effort. Nom Wah Tea Parlor's combination of over a century of continuous operation on the same historic street and its deliberate, family-driven preservation of traditional individually ordered dim sum has made it one of the most historically significant Chinese restaurants in the entire country.
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