00:00This factory in Queens, New York is America's largest producer of fortune cookies.
00:07This is the inheritance from my Chinese American ancestors and I feel fortunate to be a part of it.
00:12Norman Wang is the CEO of Wonton Food.
00:15He helped transform his dad's small noodle business into the hidden backbone of America's Chinese restaurant industry.
00:22It supplies thousands of restaurants with noodles, fried wontons and cookies.
00:27And staff write all the fortunes themselves.
00:30I mean, the whole reason we're the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world is because they don't make it in China.
00:34They don't eat fortune cookies in China.
00:36In fact, many of the most popular dishes on Chinese restaurant menus were invented in the U.S.
00:42Through the 20th century, chefs made cheap, crowd-pleasing foods like chopped suey and General Tso's chicken for American palates.
00:49Meanwhile, traditional dishes like Peking duck struggled to catch on with non-Chinese Americans.
00:58Being Chinese, people didn't understand your culture, your community, your food.
01:04But now, a new wave of Chinese restaurants is betting that Americans are finally ready for flavors that rarely left Chinatown.
01:11Trangida, a 162-year-old Beijing chain, opened its first New York City location in 2025.
01:20It takes days for chefs to prepare its famous Peking duck, which sells for $128.
01:26Someone asked me if I had a fortune cookie for them.
01:29And then I'm like, hmm, not here.
01:33So why does America have more Chinese restaurants than McDonald's and Burger King combined?
01:38And why did Americans take so long to embrace classic Chinese dishes?
01:47The oldest-running Chinese restaurant in America is tucked away in the small mountain town of Butte, Montana,
01:53known as the richest hill on Earth.
01:56The name came from its massive copper wealth, which drew Chinese immigrants to the city for mining work in the late 1800s.
02:06But the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the discrimination it fueled, pushed many businesses to stop hiring Chinese Americans.
02:15So some immigrants created their own.
02:18When Jerry Tam's ancestors opened Pekin Noodle Parlor in 1911, it had an illegal gambling ring, an opium den, hidden in the basement.
02:27This is one of the gambling tables where a shotgun would be mounted underneath it in case anyone was caught stealing.
02:34There was barrels of opium.
02:36They said street value of it was over $50,000 to $200,000.
02:41Underground tunnels gave people a safe passageway and kept these illegal businesses out of sight.
02:47Same as Chinese, you can't be a black person running around Butte, Montana.
02:51The first African-American nightclub in Butte, Montana is through that door.
02:56Upstairs in the kitchen, Jerry's ancestors served a dish that was just taking off in the U.S.
03:04Chop Suey.
03:05The name comes from the Cantonese phrase, zap suy, which means miscellaneous leftovers.
03:10The Chinese restaurant in any city or state took the leftover tidbits of food, mixed it all together, created its own natural gravy and placed it over hard noodles, soft noodles.
03:23It was just what was available to us at the time.
03:27At that time, many Americans were boycotting Chinese restaurants.
03:32But dishes like chop suey won over customers by blending new flavors with familiar ingredients.
03:38It was the first national cuisine for mass consumption for the nation.
03:43So in essence, you know, it's a predecessor to American fast food.
03:47By 1965, the U.S. had ended immigration quotas based on race and repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
03:56Meanwhile, Americans were starting to accept traditional Chinese flavors.
04:01East meets West as a handshake bridges 16,000 miles.
04:06A turning point came in 1972 when Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing, the first time an American president had visited China in 23 years.
04:15Americans watched Nixon on TV, eating traditional dishes like Peking duck.
04:20In the years that followed, the dish became more widely accepted in the U.S., alongside other regional cuisines such as Sichuan Hot Pot.
04:27Chinese restaurants across the U.S. reported spikes in sales.
04:31And it was estimated that a new one was opening every week in New York City.
04:36Americanized Chinese food stayed popular as chefs introduced new hit dishes in the 70s, like General Tso's chicken.
04:43They felt that Americans would like these kind of stronger flavors like sweet or sour.
04:50In 1973, Norman Wong's dad, Ching Sun Wong, founded Wonton Food, Inc. in New York City's Chinatown to meet spiking demand for ingredients like noodles.
05:00His uncle told him in Hong Kong, like way back, he said, as long as you hold on to this craft and skill of making noodles, you'll always be able to make a living.
05:08He produced other Chinese restaurant staples like fried wontons and wrappers for dishes like spring rolls.
05:14But later on, his most popular product became the fortune cookie.
05:19The origin of fortune cookies is just like the origin of pizza.
05:22You know, it's shrouded in, you know, mystery.
05:25I don't know if we'll ever figure it out.
05:28Multiple Chinese and Japanese families claimed to have invented them, with origins dating back to the 1800s.
05:34We believe that fortune cookies were invented on the West Coast in California by Chinese-Americans and then slowly moved to all the Chinese-American restaurants in the country.
05:43In the late 1950s, an estimated 250 million fortune cookies were being produced each year by dozens of companies.
05:51By the 80s, the treats were served with takeout orders at chains like Manchu Walk and Panda Express, as Chinese food became America's most popular ethnic cuisine.
06:01That same decade, Norman's dad bought a small fortune cookie factory.
06:05And by 2013, Wanton Food Inc. had hundreds of clients and five factories.
06:11Today, the company supplies tens of thousands of restaurants around the world and is America's top fortune cookie producer.
06:19Our fortune cooking machines are actually faster than what you can get outside, so we're not going to sell those machines to anybody else.
06:25Many of these machines are designed to tackle a challenging task, making cookies with the perfect crispy shell that won't easily crack.
06:33This one separates each shell without crushing them, while this one cushions each bag with air to keep the cookies from chipping.
06:42Air from a tiny tube blows out any that are stuck together, keeping them from being packaged in one bag.
06:48Employees dump and sort the discarded cookies here, tossing out the overly chipped ones.
06:54Wanton Food says it created this type of packaging in 1988 to help keep cookies fresh.
07:00Originally, cookies just came in a cardboard box with no additional robbing.
07:04Every single time a customer comes and they got to take one out, they just leave the bag open.
07:08And then the cookies, they start losing that crunchy texture.
07:12Next, cookies are packaged, pressed, stamped, wrapped, and shipped off to restaurants and supermarkets across the globe.
07:23Until 2017, one of the employees, Donald Lau, wrote all of the fortunes himself.
07:29But he retired when writer's block finally caught up with him.
07:33A small team of staff still keeps the tradition alive.
07:36Will you ever have AI write fortunes?
07:39I'm so sorry.
07:42No, no.
07:44I don't want to do anything that would dilute it, make it less meaningful, degrade its standing in people's eyes.
07:51In 1995, wanton started adding lucky numbers to its fortunes.
07:55Before like computers and like, you know, random number generators, we would just draw them out of a golden ball.
08:01Over the decades, Americans have won millions by playing wanton fortune numbers in actual lotteries.
08:07Like in 2005, when more than 100 lottery winners won up to half a million dollars each.
08:13There was like, reporters everywhere and we had to do a press conference.
08:17It was quite a moment.
08:22In 2010, the Chinese population in the U.S. was nearly five times larger than it was in 1980.
08:27By 2016, major restaurant chains from China, including Happy Lamb Hot Pot and Heidi Lau, had begun expanding across the U.S.
08:36As new Chinese dishes gained popularity, restaurant owners began pushing back on stereotypes that framed their cuisine as cheap or unhealthy.
08:44China has become an economic power, so a lot of new regional cuisines and more expensive restaurants have arrived in the U.S.
09:01Yan Zhang is the CEO of Transita America, the U.S. branch of China's most famous Peking duck restaurant.
09:07Transita opened its first North American location in Vancouver in 2020 and earned a Michelin star two years later.
09:24Fueled by the restaurant's Michelin success, Zhang decided to make the leap to New York City.
09:29With consumers spending in China at some of its weakest levels in years, more food chains like this are turning to overseas markets to stay afloat.
09:48Peking duck takes multiple days to make and is one of the hardest foods in Chinese cuisine to cook properly.
09:53You need to practice every day, progress every day.
09:58Howie Wang is a sous chef at Transita and trains new chefs on how to make the dish.
10:03Skin thickness and tiny scratches can change the meat's juiciness, so each duck is inspected and clean before it's hung to dry.
10:11Traditionally, the duck is hooked by its neck.
10:14But that method is tough for beginners.
10:16If the hook is slightly off, juices leak out.
10:19So the workers cut off the head and hook it lower.
10:21They boil and glaze it, which helps the skin get its perfectly light, crisp and non-greasy texture.
10:29Transita's Peking duck isn't marinated.
10:32The flavor comes from the dipping sauce.
10:35If the duck has flavor or the salt or the pepper or anything spicy, I won't say it's a traditional Chinese Peking duck.
10:43Next, they let it sit until the skin is dry and ready to be cooked.
10:46Any small error during the prep can stop the duck's skin from crisping properly or the meat from staying juicy.
10:54The duck needs roughly an hour in the oven, so getting it ready for exactly when a customer shows up isn't easy.
10:59Once it's done cooking, Howie tortures it, the final step to getting that perfect texture.
11:10Just one of these ducks costs $128.
11:13With dishes like lamb and honey, smoked fish and plum sauce, and Peking duck, Yan wants to help change the narrative of what Chinese food is and can be.
11:29Someone asked me if I had a fortune cookie for them, and then I'm like, not here.
11:37William Wu started working for Transita in 2020.
11:40What I found is that the Western guests still have limited knowledge to what Chinese people eat.
11:48They still think about what they would order at Panda Express.
11:51They're heavily battered pork with like a really colorful or really dark sweet sauce.
11:58But Transita still makes minor tweaks to accommodate its customers here in the U.S.
12:03For example, the menu doesn't include pork.
12:06Since opening its New York location, duck orders are up 30%.
12:14Even as authentic Chinese cuisine gains momentum, restaurateurs and food critics say Americanized dishes still have a rightful place on the table, too.
12:29A lot of people say it's fake Chinese, but you can still recognize the Chinese-ness.
12:35So that really opened the way for people to embrace newer kinds of cuisines from China.
12:40But running any kind of Chinese restaurant in the U.S. still has its challenges.
12:45Americans still haven't fully embraced some traditional ingredients like MSG.
12:50Since the 1960s, false rumors have spread that it causes adverse health effects like cancer and brain damage.
12:57It's blown totally out of proportion.
12:59Prejudice against Chinese food has become embedded.
13:03When society needs a scapegoat, for example, during the pandemic, Chinese often became our target.
13:10One study found that in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian restaurants lost $7.4 billion in revenue because of anti-Chinese sentiment.
13:21And rising political tensions between the U.S. and China and tariff disputes have added more pressure.
13:27Chinese Americans are sandwiched.
13:29In between, you know, a lot of Chinese Americans have said to me that we are being marginalized.
13:34Still, Chinese restaurants carry on, preserving traditions that have endured for generations.
13:40I want to knock down every Chinese restaurant in America just to say thank you for, you know, being a part of my world, understanding, like, my struggles every day.
13:48Chinese food is in demand right now because people are slowly understanding that this is high-quality food, good food, tasteful food, and they will be sick of eating, you know, french fries and chicken nuggets.
14:03And this is just kind of what's fun about the history of the Pekin.
14:08We have over 2,300 miles of underground tunnels, and this is what is truly the start of the tunnel system.
14:18And if you knock down that wall, it'll lead to a tunnel going into the building next door across the alley.
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