A Brief, Saucy History of Chinese Food

Before Massachusetts had Chinese restaurants, it had China on the table.

In Salem, long before anyone was ordering chow mein by number, the city’s ships were crossing oceans and coming home with tea, spices, porcelain, silk, and other goods from China, India, Indonesia, and ports across the East Indies. This was not Chinese restaurant food. Nobody was picking up a pu pu platter on Derby Street in 1795. But the ingredients of curiosity were already here: imported tea, Asian spices, serving wares, merchant stories, and the idea that dinner — or at least the tea table — could carry the world into a Massachusetts home.

This distinction matters. Salem did not discover China through takeout containers. Salem first encountered China through ships, cargo holds, counting rooms, tea cups, porcelain plates, museum cabinets, and the astonishing confidence of New England merchants who looked at an ocean and thought, “reasonable commute.”

Tea is the clearest early food-and-drink connection. Chinese tea was not a garnish in this story; it was central to how New Englanders consumed, displayed, and understood imported luxury. Spices also arrived through Salem’s broader Asian trade networks, though not all of them were Chinese. Much of that traffic moved through East Indies and Southeast Asian routes, which means the better phrase is not “early Chinese cooking in Salem,” but “early Asian trade goods in Salem’s pantry.”

That may sound like a narrow difference, but historically it keeps us honest. Salem’s maritime trade helped make Chinese and Asian goods familiar in Massachusetts long before Chinese immigrant restaurateurs began feeding the public. The restaurant story came later. The appetite for faraway flavors, objects, and ideas was already underway.

So Salem gives Massachusetts Chinese food history a deeper opening chapter. It is not a straight line from merchant ship to moo shu. It is more like a long preface: the region learned to desire imported tastes, imported objects, and imported stories before it learned to order Chinese food from a menu.

That layered history is useful for Wok This Way because it lets us avoid a lazy origin story. Chinese food in Massachusetts did not simply appear one day between a laundromat and a package store. It grew from trade, migration, exclusion, family labor, local ingredients, American taste, and regional stubbornness. In other words: history, but with sauce.

Chinese food in America has never been just about what is on the plate.

It is a story of immigration, exclusion, invention, survival, translation, business, family, and the deeply American habit of taking something complicated and asking whether it comes with a lunch special. Chinese immigrants began arriving in larger numbers during the 19th century, especially around the California Gold Rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Many came from southern China, particularly Guangdong province, bringing food traditions that would become an early foundation for Chinese cooking in America.

The country they entered was often hostile. Chinese immigrants faced discrimination, legal barriers, violence, and exclusion. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 sharply restricted Chinese labor immigration and shaped Chinese American life for generations. Against that backdrop, restaurants became more than places to eat. They were economic footholds, family workplaces, community infrastructure, and public-facing businesses in a country that often wanted Chinese labor and Chinese food while rejecting Chinese people.

The food that emerged was not simply “authentic Chinese food” moved unchanged across the Pacific. Nor was it “fake Chinese food,” which is a lazy insult dressed up as sophistication. It was something more interesting: a new cuisine created by Chinese cooks navigating American ingredients, American customers, racial hostility, local markets, and the practical need to sell dinner.

This is where chop suey, chow mein, egg foo young, egg rolls, fried rice, spare ribs, and wonton soup became part of the American restaurant landscape. The exact origin stories can be messy, contested, and occasionally suspicious, which feels appropriate for foods that were themselves built through negotiation. What matters is that Chinese American restaurants learned to serve across cultures while remaining anchored in the work and skill of Chinese cooks.

That early American Chinese menu was a culinary negotiation. Cooks adapted techniques, flavors, and ideas from home to local produce, available meats, American sweetness levels, portion expectations, and the national belief that a glossy sauce can solve many problems. Out of that negotiation came a new canon: familiar enough to become comfort food, different enough to feel like an event, and durable enough to survive every wave of food snobbery thrown at it.

After 1965, when U.S. immigration law changed and more immigrants arrived from different parts of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere in Asia, Chinese food in America expanded dramatically. Newer regional cuisines appeared more widely: Sichuan, Hunan, Taiwanese, Cantonese dim sum, Hong Kong café food, northern dumplings, hand-pulled noodles, hot pot, and countless other traditions that reminded Americans that “Chinese food” is not one cuisine any more than “European food” is one cuisine.

So American Chinese food is not a mistake. It is not an embarrassment. It is a cuisine born from pressure, adaptation, entrepreneurship, and customer psychology. It is immigrant history with a side of duck sauce. It can be brilliant, mediocre, nostalgic, greasy, elegant, regional, mass-produced, deeply personal, or all of the above in one paper bag.

Because sometimes authenticity is a hand-pulled noodle made with deep regional skill. And sometimes authenticity is a family-run takeout counter that has been feeding the same town since 1983, knows every regular by order number, and has never once apologized for the color of its boneless spare ribs.

Both deserve investigation. (Preferably with chopsticks and napkins.)

Massachusetts Chinese food is its own beautiful regional creature.

It lives at the intersection of Boston Chinatown, immigrant entrepreneurship, New England working-class appetite, suburban takeout culture, tiki lounges, chef-driven restaurants, beachside snack windows, college-town noodle shops, and the mysterious spiritual pull of pork fried rice in a folded white box.

The restaurant story begins in Boston. Boston’s Chinatown dates to the mid-1870s, when Chinese migrants settled around Harrison Avenue between Essex and Beach Streets. Early Chinese restaurants in Boston appear to have opened on Harrison Avenue in the early-to-mid 1880s. They served a largely Chinese immigrant population, many from Guangdong province, while also becoming part of a wider city dining culture.

But the story did not stay inside Boston. By the turn of the 20th century, Chinese restaurants were appearing in other Massachusetts cities and towns — especially mill cities, industrial centers, college communities, downtown commercial districts, and streetcar-era gathering places. Fall River, Lowell, Cambridge, Fitchburg, Lynn, Springfield, Malden, Quincy, Salem, Haverhill, New Bedford, and other communities all belong on the early map, even when the exact “first restaurant” date still deserves more archival digging.

That matters because Chinese food in Massachusetts was not simply a Boston story that later wandered into the suburbs. It spread through working Massachusetts: textile cities, shoe cities, fishing towns, factory corridors, college squares, theater districts, and beach amusements. Chinese restaurants became places where immigrant labor, local appetite, and everyday convenience met over plates of chow mein, egg foo young, fried rice, and pork with gravy.

Boston’s Chinatown remains a vital anchor: a place where Cantonese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Sichuan, northern Chinese, and other regional traditions have had room to appear, evolve, and feed generations of diners who knew exactly what they were ordering long before the rest of Boston caught up.

That line matters because it captures one of the central truths of Massachusetts Chinese food: this state contains both ends of the spectrum. You can find deeply regional Chinese cooking in and around Boston — dim sum, roast duck, clay pot rice, congee, seafood, hot pot, noodles, dumplings, Sichuan peppercorn heat, Hong Kong café dishes — and you can also find a suburban combo plate so emotionally specific that it should come with a childhood memory and a ginger ale.

One does not cancel out the other.

In fact, Massachusetts became one of the great places where Chinese food in America split into fascinating lanes. There is Chinatown and regional Chinese cooking. There is the Cambridge-Boston chef tradition. There are old-school family restaurants. There are takeout counters in mill towns, fishing towns, college towns, beach towns, and sleepy plazas where the sign has been glowing since roughly the Carter administration.

And then there is the New England Chinese style.

This is where Massachusetts gets wonderfully specific. Around here, Chinese food often leans sweeter, saucier, heavier, and more committed to the combination plate than in many other parts of the country. The local canon includes crab rangoon, boneless spare ribs, beef teriyaki, pork fried rice, egg rolls, golden fingers, lobster sauce, duck sauce, Peking ravioli, pu pu platters, and chow mein served in ways that may confuse visitors but make perfect sense to the faithful.

The most Massachusetts sauce in this story may be Boston-style brown lobster sauce. Despite the name, it does not need lobster to make its case. Around Greater Boston, lobster sauce became a glossy, savory, slightly sweet brown sauce often served with shrimp, pork, egg, and fried rice. Its darker color and sweetness are commonly linked to the region’s relationship with molasses, which gives the sauce a wonderfully local personality: part Cantonese-American adaptation, part New England trade history, part “yes, please put that over rice.”

The chow mein sandwich is the patron saint of another branch of the Massachusetts Chinese food tree. Closely associated with Fall River and later beloved in places like Salem Willows, it combines chow mein, gravy, and a hamburger-style bun into something that sounds like a dare but behaves like a regional institution. It is inexpensive, filling, portable, messy, and magnificently sincere. In other words, it belongs here.

Salem’s version of the story is especially satisfying because it has layers. The city first encountered China and Asia through maritime trade: tea, porcelain, spices, export goods, and merchant networks. More than a century later, Chinese American food became part of local popular culture through Salem Lowe and the chop suey sandwich. That is not a direct line from tea chest to takeout window, but it is a very Salem arc: global trade, local memory, and eventually gravy on a bun.

Massachusetts also has a remarkable Chinese culinary legacy through chefs and restaurateurs who helped shape how the region — and in some cases the country — understood Chinese food.

Joyce Chen is essential to that story. After leaving China in 1949, she opened her first restaurant in Cambridge in 1958 and helped introduce many Boston-area diners to northern Chinese dishes including Peking duck, moo shu pork, scallion pancakes, hot and sour soup, and potstickers. She is also widely associated with popularizing the term “Peking Ravioli” for potstickers — a phrase that may sound like a diplomatic compromise between Beijing and the North End, but somehow became pure New England menu language.

Then there is Ming Tsai, who opened Blue Ginger in Wellesley in 1998 and became one of the most visible Chinese-American chefs in the country. His East-West cooking helped bring Chinese and broader Asian influences into a polished fine-dining context, and Blue Ginger earned major early recognition.

Joanne Chang also belongs in the Massachusetts story. Best known for Flour Bakery, she brought Taiwanese and Chinese-American influences into the Boston dining scene through Myers + Chang, which she opened with Christopher Myers in the South End in 2007.

More recently, Irene Li of Mei Mei has represented another Massachusetts chapter: Chinese-American food connected to local sourcing, dumplings, sustainability, and a newer generation of restaurant leadership.

So Massachusetts Chinese food is not one thing. It is a whole ecosystem.

• It is Salem tea tables and East Indies cargo.
• It is Boston Chinatown.
• It is early restaurants in mill cities, college towns, downtown blocks, and beachside amusements.
• It is Fall River chow mein sandwiches.
• It is brown lobster sauce with New England attitude.
• It is Joyce Chen teaching Cambridge how to love Peking ravioli.
• It is Ming Tsai bringing East-West cooking to Wellesley.
• It is Joanne Chang making Taiwanese-ish food feel completely at home in the South End.
• It is Irene Li building a dumpling business with a modern conscience.
• It is the takeout place in a North Shore plaza that still uses the same menu font it had in 1996 and somehow makes exactly the fried rice you wanted.

This is why Wok This Way reviews Massachusetts Chinese food on its own terms.

• Not just: Is it authentic?
• But: What tradition is it working in?
• Is it doing that tradition well?
• Does the kitchen have pride?
• Is the duck sauce homemade, packet-based, or spiritually unresolved?
• Does the chef’s choice reveal range?
• Does the egg roll have confidence?
• Would this meal make sense after a snowstorm, a Little League game, a breakup, a beach day, a late shift, or a suspiciously long Thursday?

Massachusetts Chinese food is immigrant food, regional food, comfort food, celebration food, working-class food, chef-driven food, and “I need the Number 7 combo before I make any more decisions” food.

It has history. It has personality. It has sauce stains.