This orange chicken did not wait for you on the steam table. It is not bouncing and sweating in the darkness of a Clamshell container while driving your luggage to the gate.
In Panda Inn, the Pasadena restaurant that started Panda Express, the orange chicken is made to order, expanded with very dried chili, spring onions and a few threads of orange shell. It arrives mess and glittering on a blue stoneware plate.
Is it good? Trick question! It is sticky and it is known. It is ruthless crispy, with a flat accurate and habit-forming ratio between sweetness to acidity and heat. It is better, although not dramatically different from the one who waits for the steam table – always there, always waiting – but sometimes presentation can be everything.
Orange chicken, all dressed, reminds me of when my parents put fabric napkins and silverware while they take out boxes, transfer everything to serving plates (yes, even pizza). I used to find this absolutely loose, but now I see it as a tender gesture that underlined the luxury that they clear the night from cooking – they rarely did it.
When the Cherng family opened Panda Inn in 1973, it was a popular Chinese restaurant that occurred in the neighborhood. Early menus from the 1970s and '80s include a chicken in the mandarin peel, hissing hot plates with beef and a “Chinese pasta” part of noodle dishes.
It was a nice, sit-down restaurant that also did a little pick up and catering. It appealed to local families, but also local developers, who asked the owners to come up with a restaurant concept for the expansion of the Glendale Galleria shopping center. That restaurant was Panda Express.
Panda Express developed his orange chicken in 1987 and, depending on who you ask, the dish was the natural evolution of Mandarin-Peel chicken or a lightning invention of Andy Kao, a chef for the chain. Anyway, it helped to enclose a sweet, crowd-consuming idea of American Chinese cuisine in global culinary consciousness, now used by 2500 or so fast food counters.
It also pushed the small company of the family into a private empire: together with Panda Express, the Uncle Tetsu group, Hibachi-San and more, and the Cherng family has a capacity of more than $ 3 billion.
At the end of last year, the company completed a large renovation at the Panda Inn in Pasadena, with a red carpet that leads to a vast, glamorous, with wood paneling dining room. The ceilings are high and vaulted. There are lush pots with violet orchids in the host stand and bar.
The atmosphere seems Clubby when Panda Inn was not warm and hospitable, always peppered with screaming families who celebrate birthdays and special occasions. During my most recent visit, a flooded man enjoyed a multicourse meal in his 1970s, while the two men next to me in Armenians talked about beers, Kung Pao Chicken and Sushi.
Why is sushi on the menu? Because people love sushi, and because honey begged walnut shrimps to be converted into a sloppy but delicious role, but also because the founder and first chief of the restaurant, Ming-Tsai Cherng, lived in Yokohama's Chinatown for a few years.
Why Taiwanese popcorn chicken and stone bowls of Taiwanese stewed beef in rice? Because in the 1950s Mr Cherng worked as a chef in the Grand Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan.
You don't think of all this while you sit down for a large meal at one of the round tables for 12, while you turn the lazy Susan with Glee until the dish you want the most finally for you. But Panda Inn in Pasadena is not only a place for Panda Express Superfans to express their respect; It is a dedicated business flagship – a grand, Disneyfied running through the story of the family that this restaurant reformulates proof of the American dream.
On the newly designed menu there is a photo of Ming-Tsai Cherng, born in Yangzhou, who wears a cooking shirt and throws food in a wok. Below, in a story about the journey of the immigrant family, Panda Inn describes itself as “a restaurant that embodies a better life for everyone.”
Such a frictionless story of the American dream seems imaginative if you look at the news so much, but it doesn't have much to do with why the dining room is consistently packaged.
Although Panda Express was never my go-to, the orange chicken will occasionally go into the fried and glazed thing that I really long for, but can never again have: the sweet-and-smarable pork in a restaurant called Beijing Inn that that Once existed in London in the suburbs.
For my ninth birthday I asked my parents to make that sweet and assured pork, together with the sweet corn and chickeni drop soup. We had just moved 300 miles away, to France, and I was still angry and depressed about it, but I didn't know how to say that.
Instead, I dared to try to make me happy. I dared to recreate a dish from my favorite Chinese restaurant (impossible!), Who whose huge pleasures and disappointments have still been held in my brain.
Those details are different for everyone, but they fill the story behind the biggest hits of Panda Inn, embedded as core memories. On a certain night there is a order of orange chicken on almost any table – a dish that is not only entangled in its own business mythologies, but becomes entangled in our own.
