What The Panda Express Menu Looked Like In 1985

Panda Express is an American-Chinese restaurant chain with a menu that has put smiles on faces and noodles in bellies since 1983. Starting out as a family-run Chinese restaurant in California, Panda Express is now a global chain with locations in Mexico, Canada, Dubai, Japan, and more. Whether you swear by your favorite Panda Express dish (ahem, ours is honey walnut shrimp) or you're constantly considering how to get more food at Panda Express without breaking the bank, the restaurant is hard to ignore. With over 40 years of operation, the menu has certainly evolved and boosted the companies reputation.

However, what did the menu look like in the early years of Panda Express? Turns out, in 1985, the menu included staples such as chow mein, fried rice, and egg rolls alongside some other a la carte items like barbecued pork, sweet and sour pork, broccoli beef, fried shrimp, and chicken chop suey. At the time, the restaurant offered small, medium, and large orders for all items except the soup of the day, the egg roll, and egg foo young. Combination plates were available for $3.45, which consisted of either chow mein or fried rice with two menu items. At the time, Panda Express also had a service of beer and wine with food.

In 1985, Panda Express expanded from five outlets to a total of nine. Today, the chain has over 2,300 outlets, 47,000 associates, and generates $3 billion worth of sales. The Panda Restaurant Group website also claims that the chain is the "largest family-owned and operated Asian dining concept in America." Naturally, as Panda Express grew as one of the most recognizable American Chinese fast food restaurant chains in the United States, its menu expanded too. The chain now offers various meal combinations, including a bowl with one side and entree, or the original one side and two entrees offering, as well as bulkier options such as the balanced protein plates and Panda Cub meals for young diners.

While the original menu did cater to vegetarian options (the basic fried rice is one example), these days Panda Express offers more specific vegetarian and vegan items such as the eggplant tofu, which is available at some store locations. Panda Express also invented the popular orange chicken dish in 1987 and it remains a well-received menu item (it is said to be a game changer for the restaurant, who now makes 68 million pounds of it per year). The recipe was officially created in one of the Hawaii eateries by chef Andy Kao. It was modified from a previously popular chicken menu item (potentially a dish known as orange-flavored chicken that was on the 1985 menu) to accommodate the wishes for a boneless dish. Today, the restaurant has branched out to variations of the recipe with its hot orange chicken as a spicier version. The chain also put its first dessert on the menu in 2023 with the introduction of the apple pie roll.