Most people in the English-speaking world know chop suey as a vintage Chinese American dish. For decades, scholars and foodies have heaped scorn on it. Historian Andrew Coe, author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, characterizes the dish as a “brownish, overcooked stew, strangely flavorless, with no redeeming qualities, and redolent of bad school cafeterias and dingy, failing Chinese restaurants.”
Coe is on the mark about many American incarnations of the dish. Nowadays, most chop suey ingredients come straight from a can. To prepare it, heat up a pan, add oil, meat slivers, and sauce-covered vegetables from a tin. Then pour in soy sauce and voilà, you have a quick weeknight meal composed of soggy bean sprouts, soft water chestnuts, and faded pink bell peppers.
But chop suey arrived in the United States in the mid-19th century to much acclaim. In 1886, journalist Allan Forman recalled a splendid meal taken in New York’s Mong Sing Wah, a place he called a “Celestial Delmonico’s”—a label that compared the Chinese restaurant favorably to the era’s leading fine-dining establishment. This writer also extolled “a toothsome stew composed of bean sprouts, chicken’s gizzards and livers, calf’s tripe, dragon fish, dried and imported from China, pork, chicken and various other ingredients which I was unable to make out.” That was chop suey.
At the start of the 20th century, this stew came to exemplify what historian Samuel C. King called the “Chinese epicurean sensibility” to the American ruling class. Chefs prepared it for high-brow club meetings, plays, and formal balls. Chop suey adorned tables at Chicago’s exclusive Victoria Hotel, while American socialites served the dish at parties in their upscale private residences.
Yet chop suey’s star soon began to fade. Chinese immigrants realized they could make a living selling chop suey and other Southern Chinese fare not just to America’s rich and powerful, but also to the working class. When statesman and revolutionary Liang Qichao visited New York City in 1903, he was shocked to find hundreds of eateries catering to what he called the American “addiction” to this one dish. Liang was underwhelmed with the quality of the Americanized rendition, to put it lightly. “As for what they call ‘chop suey,’” he fumed, “the cooking skills involved are so subpar that no one in China would ever eat it.”