Bryant Ng, the chef behind the now-closed seminal restaurants Cassia in Santa Monica and Spice Table in Little Tokyo, hails from two generations of Chinese American restaurateurs. His maternal grandparents operated the 200-seat restaurant Bali Hai in Culver City in the 1950s and 1960s, serving Polynesian and Cantonese favorites like rangoons and rumaki at the height of tiki’s popularity. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Ng’s parents owned Wok Way in Northridge, where Ng lent a hand washing dishes and peeling shrimp at the “prototypical Chinese American restaurant,” he says. “That’s the restaurant that I grew up in.”

This summer, Ng is carrying on his family’s tradition and opening a Chinese American restaurant of his own. His forthcoming Jade Rabbit in Santa Monica joins an ambitious crop of Chinese American restaurants that are capturing the attention of Los Angeles’s diners right now. Places like 88 Club in Beverly Hills, Chinatown’s Firstborn, and Men & Beasts in Echo Park take influences from Chinese dishes, flavors, and techniques and blend them with contemporary trends, reinventing the rich tradition of culinary ingenuity originally born out of economic necessity nearly 200 years ago. Chinese American food — the way it is presented and the way it is understood — has evolved since the days when egg foo yong and chop suey headlined menus, and transformed in exciting ways. Think bite-sized sweet and sour sweetbread nuggets at Firstborn and vegan Cantonese barbecued pork buns styled like monkey bread at Men & Beasts.

Los Angeles’s white-hot Chinese American summer didn’t just happen overnight: It has been centuries in the making. The story of Chinese food in America is nearly as old as America itself and almost as complicated. America’s first Chinese restaurant was established in 1849 by Chinese immigrants who arrived in San Francisco during California’s Gold Rush. But Chinese restaurants didn’t spread beyond metropolitan Chinatowns and deep into America’s suburbs until well into the 1900s due to sinophobia and Chinese exclusion laws. It wasn’t until after 1965 that Chinese food went beyond catering to white American palates to reflect Chinese tastes when immigration legislation permitted hundreds of thousands of Chinese people from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China to immigrate to the United States. Los Angeles’s thriving regional Chinese food culture, centered around Monterey Park initially before spreading throughout the San Gabriel Valley and beyond, is a direct result of that policy.

The city’s contemporary Asian American restaurant scene, spearheaded largely by third-culture kids, boomed in recent years with the opening of Yang’s Kitchen, Kato, Pine & Crane, Woon, and now-closed Cantonese-inspired restaurants Ricebox, Needle, and Pearl River Deli. Not bound by tradition, these restaurants intentionally colored outside the lines, riffed on recipes, dismissed dated notions of authenticity, and charged their worth for the experience. “Look at this huge history — 200 years of Chinese and Chinese Americans creating this food out of necessity, hard work, and entrepreneurship, and creating something that is a type of regional Chinese cuisine,” says Ng. “The region that influences it is America.”

Much of the culinary creativity that Los Angeles embraces right now wouldn’t be possible without a receptive audience that understands and supports it. The city’s collective appetite for Chinese food and its robust Asian population make it uniquely fit to embrace Chinese American fare in its diverse forms, from Pasadena icon Panda Inn, which opened in 1973 and reopened in December 2024 after a years-long remodel, to robot-powered fast-food spot Tigawok in Burbank and Sawtelle. “The LA diner is very curious. They’re not afraid to try something new,” says Mei Lin, who opened 88 Club in April and previously operated the now-closed James Beard-nominated and Eater Award-winning Nightshade. “I’m always willing to put something weird on the menu, whether or not it’s weird to them.”

Lin points to the cold tofu skin salad as one of her more out-of-the-box offerings. Inspired by the appetizer served at Michelin-recognized Bistro Na’s in Temple City, the salad mixes in snappy celery and a hit of red vinegar. On 88 Club’s menu, it sits alongside classic Chinese American homages like kung pao scallops and sweet and sour fish. Lin’s dishes have landed in a similarly upscale room as the nearby Beverly Hills Mr. Chow, which opened in 1974 and specializes in Beijing duck and hand-pulled noodles.

Anthony Wang, who grew up in the suburbs of Miami and Atlanta, was afraid that diners would “pigeonhole us to being authentic” before opening Firstborn in March, he says. But with dishes like tofu-skin-wrapped duck sausage, charred cabbage, and Chongqing fried chicken heaped with a confetti of dried chiles found atop nearly every table, Wang’s fear has subsided. “I’ve never claimed to understand or know ‘authentic’ Chinese food,” he says. “The food is just storytelling from my perspective, my own experiences of being Chinese American.”

Firstborn’s menu pulls from Wang’s food memories, travels, training, and San Gabriel Valley favorites and taps into the kind of personal narrative cooking that resonates with diners today. His creations seek to give Chinese American food a sense of place that dishes like orange chicken and General Tso’s chicken lack, he says. His version of a wood ear mushroom cold appetizer is rooted in Southern California cooking and comprised of turnips, tofu, and sugar snap peas dressed in a punchy horseradish vinaigrette. “We wanted to cook from a place that told a story of where we were and give our guests a feeling of time and place,” says Wang. “We try to utilize seasonal and local products whenever we can.”

Like Wang, Lin grew up outside of Los Angeles in Dearborn, Michigan, where her family owned a Chinese American restaurant called Kong Kow. “I don’t know that I would have been confident enough to have opened up this type of restaurant five years ago,” says Lin. “As a Chinese American kid, you’re never Chinese enough, and you’re never American enough, and so we always live in that weird gap of just trying too hard.”

Lin changed her mind about not wanting to cook Chinese food following a trip that she and her family took together to their hometown of Taishan in southern China, where she dove headfirst into the region’s vibrant Cantonese cuisine. “If I had not taken that trip last year, I don’t think I would have been able to put myself into the food that I’m making at 88,” she says.

While Lin recognizes that the dishes coming out of 88 Club’s kitchen aren’t traditional (“I don’t call anything I do traditional,” she says), the Chinese American banner doesn’t quite resonate with her either. “It is a modern Chinese restaurant located in Beverly Hills serving dishes inspired by my childhood and my upbringing,” she says. “It’s very straightforward. The food on the plate is what it is, and I will make that food as unapologetic as possible.” Everything gets served family-style, shared around a lazy Susan, and seasoned to be paired with rice, including saucy dishes like the Sichuan fish-fragrant eggplant and Taiwanese-inspired three-cup maitake.

Across town at Men & Beasts in Echo Park, which debuted in June, Alex Falco and Huimin “Minty” Zhu are taking a similar approach through a mostly vegan lens. “We’re continuing that spirit of innovation toward Chinese cuisine,” says Falco, who co-owned the restaurant Minty Z with Zhu in Miami before the couple relocated to Los Angeles. Their collaborative menu, which features many dishes from Zhu’s formative years in Hunan province, takes recognizably Chinese dishes like dumplings, salt and pepper chicken wings, and wontons and prepares them with homemade plant-based proteins. Some of the more unique menu items include “monkey buns,” a mashup of monkey bread and barbecued pork buns made with char siu seitan and a glossy hoisin sauce, as well as deep-fried sesame balls formed with carrot-infused mochi and filled with crushed black sesame paste.

The restaurant’s adjoining tea room has a separate entrance offering a convivial space for socializing sans alcohol. “In 2025, we find that people are not drinking much alcohol anymore for health reasons, mostly, but we wanted to do something for our clientele that would still create a vibe,” says Falco. Patrons are encouraged to linger over elaborate tea ceremonies paired with snacks from Men & Beast’s main menu.

The emphasis on shaping a welcoming environment echoes at Jade Rabbit, with its well-stocked steam table buffet, fast-casual service, and affordable pricing. “We wanted to make sure that we had something that, from a price point perspective, was very approachable,” says Ng, who runs the business alongside his wife, Kim Luu-Ng. “We don’t come from generational wealth. We don’t come from privilege. We wanted a restaurant that was accessible to everyday people like ourselves, especially right now.”

The meals at Jade Rabbit are priced with affordability in mind (from $12 to $20) and formatted for convenience, but Ng does not compromise on quality ingredients and creativity. The fast-casual set up may seem familiar to anyone who’s dined at a Panda Express, while the food pushes the definition of Chinese American cuisine in more expansive ways. The restaurant’s beef and broccoli, a quintessential Chinese American dish, takes cues from Chinese Peruvian lomo saltado. A smattering of beef, broccoli, tomatoes, onions, and fried potatoes gets wok-fired in a savory green bird’s eye chile sauce. “It’s an ode to our brethren’s diaspora culture in Peru. A celebration of all the diaspora together in one dish. What could be more American than that?” says Ng.

Jade Rabbit’s kale salad is visually reminiscent of tabbouleh but tastes distinctly Chinese American. A combination of kale, cabbage, scallions, quinoa, and roasted cashews gets chopped finely enough to be eaten with a spoon before cashew dressing spins in. Fine print on the menu reminds diners that the salad may look like it came from a “California-Mediterranean spread, but dishes like this show how Chinese American cuisine keeps evolving.”

Meeting diners where they are is a core tenet of the Chinese American culinary tradition, with flexibility and adaptation baked into the cuisine — first by need, then by choice. Los Angeles’s latest newcomers push these age-old foodways in thrilling directions by embracing change and harnessing their personal journeys as a raison d’être. “I look at other chefs opening restaurants that are Chinese influenced, or Chinese American influenced, and it says a lot about where we are as Asian Americans and Chinese Americans,” says Ng. “It’s heartening to see now, in this particular moment, that we are very much taking pride in who we are and accepting — acknowledging — our cross-cultural identities.”