Chinese restaurant might be oldest in U.S.
UC Davis researchers trying to confirm 1903 opening date
Stepping inside the unassuming Chicago Cafe in Woodland, near Sacramento in Yolo County, is like a trip through time. Owners Paul and Nancy Fong still cook each order for their regulars who sit on stools at the diner counter, waiting on plates of fried prawns and pork fried rice. Old pictures and newspaper clippings hang on the wall, covered in the unmistakable patina of an old family restaurant.
But Chicago Cafe isn’t just old. Using documents like these and extensive archival research, a team at UC Davis recently confirmed that Chicago Cafe is the oldest Chinese restaurant in California. The restaurant at 411 Main St. is documented to have begun serving customers in 1910, though its origins could stretch back to 1903, as printed on menus. If true, that would make it the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the United States as well.
UC Davis School of Law Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin is leading the research into Chicago Cafe, part of a larger project involving students of law, comparative literature and history examining discriminatory laws against Asian people in California. Tracing the history of the cafe or other Asian-owned businesses is difficult because, for example, turn-of-the-century directories excluded Chinese-owned businesses.
Chin began to take an interest in finding the oldest Chinese restaurants in the country when traveling to conferences and on trips. He has visited the Pekin Noodle Parlor in Butte, Mont., founded in 1909 (though some records have it in 1911) and often cited as the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the country. “It is a fantastic facility and a fantastic restaurant,”
“People always tell us this is the real Chinese food they’ve always known. Our stuff is original to so many people.” Andy Fong, whose great-grandfather was the first in his family to work at the restaurant
he said of the Montana landmark.
But back in California, and unknown to Chin, history was just a 20-minute drive from campus. On a visit to Woodland, a Sacramento-area suburb of around 60,000 inhabitants, he was drawn by the Chicago Cafe’s hole-in-the-wall look. Surveying the menu, he saw the restaurant’s claim of opening in 1903, which would effectively make it the oldest Chinese restaurant in the United States.
“I decided I was going to look into it,” said Chin “Any place can say it started in 1903, so it is important to evaluate the historical record.”
The owners and their son Andy Fong maintain the 1903 opening date is correct. Andy Fong said his great-grandfather, an immigrant from the Guangdong province, was the first in his family to work at the restaurant, though it is unclear if he was the one who opened it. (The origins of the restaurant’s name are also opaque.) The business, located in what was once Woodland’s Chinatown, allowed the Fongs to immigrate in waves that continued with Andy’s grandfather, then his parents, Paul and Nancy, who have worked at the restaurant since the 1970s.
Andy Fong has taken up the role of unofficial historian for the restaurant to work with the UC Davis team in their research, though he lives in South San Francisco and has made a career outside of the restaurant. He points to several mementos diners have given his dad that share a wall with old photos and articles. There’s a taxidermied peacock and a deer head; and a signed baseball given to Paul Fong by Woodland local and two-time World Series champion Dustin Pedroia.
“My dad is very much a people person and he has decorated with these things people bring in. It’s a home kind of feel,” Andy Fong said
For about a year now, Chin and a team of students have studied the diner’s history as documented in local registries, newspaper archives and other historical sources. Accounts of the restaurant serving customers earlier than 1910 have been spotted in newspapers from the ’30s and ’40s.
“More probable than not, a date in 1903 or 1904 is correct,” Chin said.
That would make Chicago Cafe older than San Francisco’s oldest operating Chinese restaurant, Sam Wo, which is believed to have opened in 1908, and is credited by the Chinese Restaurant Foundation as the oldest in the United States. Chin doesn’t question Sam Wo’s tradition and 1908 opening date, but in his research, he has not found the documentation to support the claim. And unlike the Chicago Cafe, the San Francisco restaurant has not been in continuous operation, having shut down in 2012 and reopened in 2015 at a new location.
The Fong family has kept records of the restaurant, such as a menu from 1917, as well as photos and advertisements from a high school yearbook dating back to 1915. Stacks of menus from 1933 and 1953 featured “American” daily specials that included prime rib and filet of sole, though the Chinese dishes remained the same.
Andy Fong remembers growing up around the restaurant, where every day began at 6 a.m. for breakfast and ended with dinner at the restaurant after closing at 7 p.m. The menu is largely the same as he remembers, with early Chinese American dishes like chow mein, chop suey and egg foo young as well as American-style breakfast plates with eggs and bacon. The consistency has brought generations of regulars, who have dined at the Chicago Cafe for decades.
“People always tell us this is the real Chinese food they’ve always known. Our stuff is
original to so many people,” Andy Fong said. Online, some boast their families have been patrons for 60 years.
Chin explained that the Chinese American menu at Chicago Cafe and so many contemporary restaurants was influenced by the “chop suey craze” at the turn of the century, fueled by non-Chinese people drawn to a cuisine they saw as exotic. Newspapers and travel logs of the time wrote about foods like chop suey, egg foo young and chow mein, creating demand.
“There was an idea of what Chinese food was, so that’s what restaurants served,” he said.
The investigation will resume soon, with steps including a search through the restaurant’s floors and walls seeking any artifacts and documents that can provide evidence of a foundation earlier than 1910. Searches into other buildings in Woodland’s old Chinatown have brought up opium bottles and pipes from the 19th century, letters and WWII draft registration cards, which can shed more light on the history of Chinatown, the business and its building.
As a generation of operators retires, many of America’s longrunning Chinese restaurants are in peril of having their centuries of history come to an end in the coming years. Andy Fong and sister Amy did not take over the restaurant and instead pursued careers of their own, as is common in many immigrant-owned businesses. In S.F.’s Chinatown, Sam Wo may close if a new owner doesn’t take over the restaurant by the time its lease expires in January 2025.
While it wouldn’t change Chicago Cafe’s long history or necessarily help it survive longer, Andy Fong says finding the evidence to confirm a 1903 opening would be a nice surprise. “Restaurants don’t stay in business that long, so that would be a testament to our perseverance,” he said.