Chop Suey for Two: The Role of Chinese Restaurants in the Leisure Industry, 1900–30

The American public adores Chinese food. Today, there are over 45,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, which is more than the combined total of Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s restaurants. In this paper, I present the early history of culinary adventurism into Chinese cuisines. Focusing on New York, which had the highest concentration of Chinese restaurants in the United States, I argue that New Yorkers patronized Chinese restaurants during the 1920s and 1930s to experiment with their sexuality.

Situating early twentieth-century Chinese restaurants within the emergence of commercialized leisure, I examine the place of chop suey shops, the most prevalent type of Chinese restaurant at the time, in urban youth culture. Chop suey joints were popular among young, urbane New Yorkers because of their location in hotbeds of nightlife: the Theater District, the Lower East Side, and the Bowery. This generation of New Yorkers came down with “the chop suey craze” because Chinese restaurants provided a hospitable location for sexual experimentation. Because the Chinese staff acted aloof to their clients’ behavior, young couples could evade their communities’ social conventions of courtship by rendezvousing at Chinese restaurants. Female prostitutes solicited johns on the dining floor and men interested in other men met up in secluded corner booths. Occasionally, the head waiter helped clients have illicit encounters. By staying open to the early morning hours, Chinese restaurants provided a contact zone for people looking to live outside the boundaries of propriety.

This social history of Chinese restaurants challenges the assumption that Chinese food’s popularity stems from its gustatory qualities. Rather, this popularity traces to the social function it served in the lives of their patrons. Using digital mapping programs, I track the spatial distribution of Chinese restaurants in relationship to the rise of commercialized leisure in Manhattan.