Panda Express Invented This Ridiculously Popular Chicken Dish In The 1980s

Much of the Chinese dishes that Americans know and love were actually born stateside, when Chinese-Americans adapted ingredients and tastes to suit their new home. Some of the most well-known dishes are undoubtably chop suey, General Tso's chicken, and orange chicken. You might be surprised to learn that the hugely popular orange chicken was actually invented by Panda Express, the now-global chain that grew from a single family-owned restaurant in Southern California.

Panda Express' executive chef Andy Kao created the dish at one of the chain's locations in Hawaii in 1987, according to the company's co-founder and CEO Andrew Cherng in a 2017 interview with NPR. The dish is made of lightly battered, fried, boneless dark-meat chicken in a sticky sweet and citrusy sour sauce with a touch of heat. It's Panda Express' signature dish, and we ranked it the second best item on the entire menu (just behind the honey walnut shrimp).

Before there was a Panda Express or orange chicken, there was Panda Inn and a dish from China's Hunan Province called chen pi ji, a bone-in chicken dish made with citrus peel. In 1973, chef Ming Tsai Cherng, born in Yangzhou, China, opened Panda Inn with his son Andrew and Andrew's wife, Peggy. Cherng adjusted traditional recipes for American tastes and, a decade later, launched Panda Express in a mall in Glendale and quickly expanded.

Chef Andy Kao, who is originally from Taiwan, is credited with creating orange chicken, but it's likely that the dish's origins came from the more traditional Hunan chicken citrus peel dish, which is much less sweet. Similar to other Americanized Chinese dishes, orange chicken has had its fair share of detractors, but it also has its defenders who have described it as as just another type of Chinese cooking no less authentic than mainland dishes. In fact, orange chicken has become a standard at many Chinese restaurants. Panda Express alone sells more than 115 million pounds of orange chicken every year and it's such a hit that the chain created a vegan version, as well.