This orange chicken has not been waiting for you on the steam table. It has not been bouncing and sweating in the darkness of a clamshell container while you wheel your luggage to the gate.
At Panda Inn, the Pasadena restaurant that started Panda Express, the orange chicken is made to order, strewed with whole dried chiles, scallions and a few threads of orange zest. It arrives craggy and glistening on a blue stoneware plate.
Is it good? Trick question! It is sticky, and it is familiar. It is relentlessly crunchy, with a flatly precise and habit-forming ratio of sweetness to acidity to heat. It is better, though not dramatically different from the one that waits on the steam table — always there, always waiting — but sometimes presentation can be everything.
Orange chicken, all dressed up, reminds me of when my parents set out cloth napkins and silverware while unpacking boxes of takeout, transferring everything to serving plates (yes, even pizza). I used to find this absolutely unhinged, but now I see it as a tender gesture that underscored the luxury of their taking the night off from cooking — they did it so rarely.
When the Cherng family opened Panda Inn in 1973, it was a popular Chinese restaurant that catered to the neighborhood. Early menus from the 1970s and ’80s included a bone-in tangerine-peel chicken, sizzling beef hot plates and a “Chinese Pasta” section of noodle dishes.
It was a nice, sit-down restaurant that also did a bit of takeout 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 mall. That restaurant was Panda Express.
Panda Express developed its orange chicken in 1987 and, depending on whom you ask, the dish was either the natural evolution of tangerine-peel chicken or a lightning invention of Andy Kao, a chef for the chain. Either way, it helped to embed a sweet, crowd-pleasing idea of American Chinese cuisine into the global culinary consciousness, now deployed through 2,500 or so fast-food counters.
It also propelled the family’s small business into a privately held empire: Along with Panda Express, the group owns Uncle Tetsu, Hibachi-San and more, and the Cherng family has a net worth of more than $3 billion.
At the end of last year, the company completed a major renovation to the Panda Inn in Pasadena, with a red carpet that leads into a sprawling, glamorous, wood-paneled dining room. The ceilings are high and vaulted. There are lush pots of violet orchids at the host stand and bar.
The vibe would seem clubby if Panda Inn weren’t warm and welcoming, always peppered with shouty families celebrating birthdays and special occasions. On my most recent visit, an impeccably well-dressed man in his 70s enjoyed a multicourse meal on his own, while the two men next to me chatted in Armenian over beers, kung pao chicken and sushi.
Why is sushi on the menu? Because people love sushi, and because honey walnut shrimp was begging to be converted into a sloppy but delightful roll, but also because the restaurant’s founder and first chef, Ming-Tsai Cherng, lived and worked for some years in Yokohama’s Chinatown.
Why Taiwanese popcorn chicken and stone bowls of Taiwanese braised beef on rice? Because in the 1950s, Mr. Cherng worked as a chef at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan.
You’re not thinking about all this as you sit down for a big meal at one of the round tables for 12, spinning the lazy susan with glee until the dish you want most is finally in front of you. But Panda Inn in Pasadena isn’t just a place for Panda Express superfans to come and pay their respects; it’s a devoted corporate flagship — a grand, Disneyfied spin through the family’s story that reframes this restaurant as proof of the American dream.
On the newly designed menu, there’s a photo of Ming-Tsai Cherng, born in Yangzhou, wearing a cook’s shirt and tossing food in a wok. Below, in a story about the immigrant family’s journey, Panda Inn describes itself as “a restaurant that embodies the pursuit of a better life for all.”
Such a frictionless story of the American dream seems fanciful if you so much as glance at the news, but it also doesn’t have much to do with why the dining room is consistently packed.
Even though Panda Express was never my go-to, the orange chicken will occasionally stand in for the fried and glazed thing that I genuinely long for, but can never have again: the sweet-and-sour pork at a restaurant called Peking Inn that once existed in suburban London.
For my ninth birthday, I asked my parents to make me that sweet-and-sour pork, along with the sweet corn and chicken egg-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 all that.
Instead, I dared them to try and make me happy. I dared them to recreate a dish from my favorite Chinese restaurant (impossible!), one whose vast pleasures and disappointments are still hard-wired into my brain.
Those particulars are different for everyone, but they fill out the story behind Panda Inn’s greatest hits, embedded like core memories. On any given night, there’s an order of orange chicken on nearly every table — a dish that isn’t just tangled up in its own corporate mythologies, but tangled up in our own.
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