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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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Wo Hop
Wo Hop opened in 1938 in a basement space on Mott Street in Manhattan's Chinatown, and the restaurant has operated continuously in that same below-street-level location for well over eight decades, becoming one of the most historically significant Cantonese-American restaurants in the entire city. The restaurant became particularly known as a late-night destination, historically staying open into the early morning hours to serve a mix of Chinatown workers finishing overnight shifts and diners looking for a meal after a night out elsewhere in the city, a role that shaped much of its identity independent of its daytime business. Wo Hop has deliberately kept its menu and cash-only operation largely unchanged for decades, resisting the kind of renovation or menu modernization many comparably old restaurants eventually pursue, a consistency that's made it a specific point of pride for generations of regulars. Wo Hop's combination of over eight decades of continuous operation in the same basement Mott Street space and its deliberately unchanged late-night Cantonese-American menu has made it one of the most historically preserved Chinese restaurants anywhere in the country.
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