WBUR News17%
The unique history of Chinese food in Greater Boston 15%
By Rob Lane12%
7/31/2026, 6:07:47 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Anecdotal, and Overconfidence Bias, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 13.2% saturation with 157 hits. Analysis detected 1,385 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,191 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 26.5% and a BS Rank of 15% (21,602 of 25,266 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 85.50% of the article peer group.
Greater Boston’s deliciously greasy, boozy Chinese food scene isn’t too concerned with authenticity.
Despite the chopsticks on the table and the Mandarin characters on the marquee, most local restaurants’ offerings bear little resemblance to traditional dishes in Guangdong or Sichuan.
But what the American Chinese food popular in Massachusetts lacks in authenticity, it makes up for with its own rich heritage.
Chinese cuisine first reached the United States in the 19th century, when early immigrants from southern China inspired a chop suey fad.
Over the next several decades, further waves of Asian-American cooks brought more of their native dishes, modifying them — a pinch of sugar here, a dash of white pepper there — to appeal to American palates.
Through that process of trial and error, a new cuisine blossomed.
Crab rangoon and fortune cookies emerged from California; egg rolls and General Tso’s chicken became popular in New York.
Dishes once seen by Americans as exotic became familiar comfort food in nearly every corner of the country.
And in Massachusetts, a particularly local flavor developed.
Take General Tso’s chicken, which I grew up ordering from Hong Kong Treasures in Attleboro as “General Gau’s chicken.”
The peculiar variation — you’ll also sometimes see it spelled “Gao’s” — is quite common in Massachusetts and virtually nonexistent elsewhere.
There’s no clear explanation for that regional quirk.
But it’s one of many.
Massachusetts’ lobster sauce, for instance, is distinctively dark and sticky because local chefs use molasses to sweeten it.
Fall River is home to the unusual chow mein sandwich, which consists of stir-fried noodles served on a hamburger bun (not to be confused with the chop suey sandwich popularized by the now-closed North Shore Chinese restaurant Salem Lowe).
And other details hidden in the state’s Chinese menus hint at fascinating twists and turns in the area’s long love affair with Asian cooking.
Peking ravioli
Joyce Chen opened her first restaurant in Cambridge in 1958.
She’d come to America about a decade earlier, shortly after Congress repealed the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act.
She was part of the first major wave of immigrants from northern China to the U.S.
They brought with them regional recipes, including hot and sour soup, moo shu and a dish that would come to define Chen’s legacy: jiaozi, meat- and vegetable-filled dumplings.
Chen, who would become one of the most prolific Chinese restaurateurs in Greater Boston’s history, saw an opportunity to introduce northern Chinese flavors to the U.S.
She also saw a marketing problem.
At the time, Americans thought of dumplings as flavorless and mushy.
“Like Cracker Barrel type of dumplings,” her son, Stephen Chen, told me.
“Just the dough.
She wanted to have something that would show that there was a filling inside.”
She cast about for a different name for the dish, and landed on “Peking ravioli” — a nod, perhaps, to the nascent Italian food scene in Boston’s North End.
The name stuck.
Then, it spread.
The proliferation of Peking ravioli throughout Massachusetts was mostly thanks to Chen’s army of cooks.
Over the course of her career, Stephen Chen said his mother brought dozens of Chinese chefs into the country to staff her expanding restaurant empire.
“She had to work with immigration, with congressmen, with the Labor Department,” to secure green cards for the cooks, he said.
“She was able to convince them that Chinese chefs actually had special talents that could not be duplicated in America.”
Many of those chefs ultimately left Chen’s kitchens to pursue their own American dreams.
“They went out and opened their own restaurants,” Stephen Chen said.
“And they kept the Peking ravioli name.”
To this day, in Massachusetts, Peking ravioli is a Chinese takeout staple.
In the rest of the country, that same food item appears on menus under the bland name that Chen spurned: dumplings.
Chinese chicken fingers
In 2021, a stranger reached out to Doug Mack with a question: where do Chinese chicken fingers come from?
Mack receives questions like this all the time.
He’s a Midwestern food writer who’s researched the history of snacks like animal crackers and seven-layer dip.
But this one threw him for a loop because he’d never heard of Chinese chicken fingers.
“That’s not something I’ve ever seen on a menu here in Minnesota,” he recalled thinking.
“It might exist, but not at any of the restaurants that I’ve been to.”
Turns out, the man who’d submitted the question, Ranjan Roy, grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Like countless other people in Greater Boston, he’d grown up eating thickly battered chicken strips from Chinese takeout joints, unaware that he was participating in a hyperlocal culinary tradition.
But Roy had asked the right guy.
Mack is fascinated by regional variations in American Chinese food.
(He’s particularly interested in cream cheese wontons, a delicacy in his home state of Minnesota.)
And after some research, Mack landed on a theory about Chinese chicken fingers, tracing the origin of the dish to the mid-20th century Polynesian craze that gripped Boston.
“ There is a whole fascination with all things South Pacific after World War II,” Mack said.
“Often as this sort of caricatured, exoticized version, of course.
It's nothing that anyone would recognize as authentic.”
Tiki bars sprung up in and around the city, each jockeying to be more over-the-top than the last.
Restaurateurs poured on the kitsch, embracing outlandish decor: themed mugs, bamboo, animatronic birds.
Several Chinese entrepreneurs got in on the fad.
By the 1960s, Cantonese immigrants owned two of Greater Boston’s most extravagant tiki spots: Bob Lee’s Islander in Chinatown, and Madeline and Bill Wong’s Kowloon on Route 1 in Saugus.
The Kowloon, open for business to this day despite eventual plans for a teardown, stands as a living monument to that era.
Patrons still flock there — and now to a new Kowloon location on Revere Beach — to sip Mai Tais beneath plastic palm trees, while snacking on ostensibly Chinese and Polynesian fare from hors d'oeuvres trays called pu pu platters.
Mack suspects it’s the pu pu platter where the Chinese chicken finger originated.
He says chicken fingers would have blended right in on a plate with other fried morsels.
“It’s breaded, it’s finger food.
It sits well on the platter with your egg rolls, with your spare ribs, with your chicken wings,” he said.
“You could almost see it as a variation on an egg roll or a wonton.”
Seeking to capitalize on the trend, Chinese restaurants throughout Massachusetts started to incorporate tiki food into their menus.
Mack said it’s worth noting that China and Polynesia are not remotely close to each other.
“But as a selling point for audiences who aren't familiar with the historic traditions and foods of these places, there is common ground in that it seems exotic,” he said.
As the region’s Chinese menus matured into their contemporary form in the latter half of the 20th century, even Chen’s restaurants began to offer chicken fingers.
“I mean, there was a demand for it,” Stephen Chen said.
“You know, you’re not really a Chinese restaurant unless you have a pu pu platter.”
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