You talk about different waves or generations of Chinese-American cuisine. In Chinatown you cannot survive with only Chinese customers, and the Chinese customers are, frankly, not that generous. You certainly want to have two menus if you can. How did restaurants deal with it?īronson: It's still a problem. So once you have all these new immigrants, you get this big divide between what Chinese customers want to eat and what non-Chinese customers want to eat. And then, with more new Chinese immigrants arriving, you see the revival of Chinese restaurants for Chinese people. Also in the '70s and '80s, with Americans becoming more exposed to Chinese culture through books and travel, you get a greater demand for authentic food. And when these trained chefs arrived, that's when chop suey began to decline.įirst of all, you are finally getting chefs who are trained in real Chinese food.

But starting in the mid-'60s you have people sponsoring their relatives to come here, and they had to have training and certificates from cooking schools. Why?īronson: Before the 1960s you had very limited Chinese immigration to the United States (due to the Chinese Exclusion Act), and most of the cooks are non-trained chefs improvising and learning on the job. So chop suey enjoys this long honeymoon in the Chinese-American food palaces like the Hoe Sai Gai - my great-grandfather's enormous restaurant that was located on the site of Daley Plaza - but then falls off in the late 1960s. Even when people are bitterly anti-Chinese, they still kind of like Chinese things. How and when did it become so popular here?īronson: Sometime in the late 1880s chop suey suddenly appears from nowhere, and for some reason it catches on in a big way with the foreign population. So you believe that someone from Taisan put together a variation of a real dish, and voila. The thing that confuses everybody is that from its name, which roughly means bits and pieces, it sounds like you just throw anything in like a leftover type dish, but in fact it has fixed ingredients that don't vary that much. But that Taisan dish has quite different ingredients. But there is a real dish from Taisan called chop suey. Bronson: Chop suey never appears in American literature for 30 years after the gold rush period, so so much for that theory.

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