This orange chicken wasn't waiting for you on the steam table. While steering the luggage to the gate, it is not bouncing or sweating in the darkness of the clamshell container.
Pandain, a Pasadena restaurant that launched Panda Express, produces orange chicken to order and is littered with several threads of dried chili, green onions and orange peel. It feels a rough glow on a blue stoneware plate.
May I? Trick questions! It is sticky and familiar. It is mercilessly crunchy, with sweetness and acidity to heat that forms a sharp, accurate, and habitual habit. It's not dramatically different from what you're waiting at the steam table, but always there, always waiting, but sometimes the presentation is everything.
The orange chicken reminds me of when parents dressed up all the way up, setting up cloth napkins and silverware while unpacking takeaway boxes, and then moving everything to a serving plate (yes, even pizza). I thought this was absolutely indifferent, but now I see it as a gentle gesture that emphasizes the luxury of spending the night out from cooking.
When the Cherng family opened Panda Inn in 1973, it was a popular Chinese restaurant serving the neighborhood. The menu from the early 1970s and 80s included bone-in tangerine peel chicken, a baking beef hot plate and a “Chinese pasta” section of noodle dishes.
It was a lovely sit-in restaurant with a bit of takeaway and catering. He appealed not only to local families but also to local developers. The local developer asked the owner to keep a restaurant concept for the Glendale Galleria Mall expansion. The restaurant was Panda Express.
Panda Express developed orange chicken in 1987, and depending on who you ask, the dish was either a natural evolution of tangerine peel chicken or the invention of the lightning bolts of Andikao, the chain's chef. Either way, it helped to embed the sweet, crowd-pleasing ideas of American Chinese cuisine into a global culinary consciousness.
It also drove the family's small businesses into a private empire. Along with Panda Express, the group owns Uncle Titsu, Hibachi and others, and the Cherng family has a net worth of over $3 billion.
Late last year, the company completed a major renovation of Pandain in Pasadena. The red carpet leads to a vast, gorgeous, wooden paneled dining room. The ceiling is high and arched. The host stand and bar features lush pots of violet rung.
The atmosphere looks like a club if Pandains are not warmly welcomed and always studded with screaming families celebrating birthdays and special occasions. On my recent visit, a perfectly well dressed man from the 70s enjoyed a large meal on his own, but the two men next to me were Armenians through beer, campao chicken and sushi. We chatted.
Why is sushi on the menu? Because people loved sushi and begged to be converted into a sloppy but fun roll of honey walnut shrimp.
Why do Taiwanese popcorn chicken and rice have a bowl of Taiwanese stewed beef stones? This is because in the 1950s, Cherng worked as a chef at a Grand Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan.
You are not thinking about this as you are sitting in one of the 12 round tables seeking a big meal. But the Pandain in Pasadena is not a place where Panda Express super fans come and pay tribute. It is the flagship of a dedicated company. It's a grand Disney feed spin through the story of a family that reconstructs this restaurant as evidence of an American dream.
The newly designed menu features a photograph of Min Tsai Chernig, born in Yangtzu, wearing a chef's shirt and throwing food in a wok. Below, in a story about the journey of immigrant families, Pandain describes as “a restaurant that seeks a better life for everyone.”
This frictionless story of the American Dream seems fantasy if you saw the news at first glance, but it also has little to do with the reason why the dining room is consistently packed.
Panda Express has never been my go-to, but orange chicken will sometimes stand up to the fried and glazed things I really crave, but I never have it again: Peking In. Sweet and dressed pork in a restaurant once existed outside of London.
For my 9th birthday, my parents asked me to make sweet pork, along with sweet corn and chicken egg drop soup. We moved to France just 300 miles away and I was still angry and depressed about it, but I didn't know how to say it all.
Instead, I dared them to make me happy. I dared them to recreate the dishes from my favorite Chinese restaurant (impossible!).
These details are different for everyone, but they fill the story behind Pandain's biggest hit and are embedded like core memories. At any time, almost every table will have an order of orange chicken. It is not only entangled with the myth of its own company, but also our own.
