To avoid a beating, the cook threw leftover meat and vegetables into a wok and served it to the miners, who loved it and asked what dish it was-he replied 'chopped sui'. Coincidentally, both restaurants are now named Far East Café.Īnother myth is that, in the 1860s, a Chinese restaurant cook in San Francisco was forced to serve something to drunken miners after hours, when he had no fresh food. Restaurants like this are now rare, but were once a common sight in the United States. Yu speculates that shrewd Chinese American restaurant owners took advantage of the publicity surrounding his visit to promote chop suey as Li's favorite. Yet recent research by the scholar Renqui Yu led him to conclude that 'no evidence can be found in available historical records to support the story that Li Hung Chang ate chop suey in the United States.' Li brought three Chinese chefs with him, and would not have needed to eat in local restaurants or invent new dishes in any case. Another story is that Li wandered to a local Chinese restaurant after the hotel kitchen had closed, where the chef, embarrassed that he had nothing ready to offer, came up with the new dish using scraps of leftovers. Another tale is that it was created during Qing Dynasty premier Li Hongzhang's visit to the United States in 1896 by his chef, who tried to create a meal suitable for both Chinese and American palates. One account claims that it was invented by Chinese American cooks working on the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century. In Chinese Indonesian cuisine/dutch chinese indonesian cuisine it is known as cap cai (tjap tjoi) (雜菜, 'mixed vegetables') and mainly consists of vegetables.įilipino chop suey, introduced during the American colonial period of the Philippines It is typically served with rice but can become the Chinese-American form of chow mein with the substitution of stir-fried noodles for rice.Ĭhop suey has become a prominent part of American Chinese cuisine, Filipino cuisine, Canadian Chinese cuisine, German Chinese cuisine, Indian Chinese cuisine, and Polynesian cuisine. For other uses, see chop suey (disambiguation) Chop sueyĬhop suey ( / ˈ tʃ ɒ p ˈ s uː i/) is a dish in American Chinese cuisine and other forms of overseas Chinese cuisine, consisting of meat (usually chicken, pork, beef, shrimp or fish) and eggs, cooked quickly with vegetables such as bean sprouts, cabbage, and celery and bound in a starch-thickened sauce. For the New England dish, see American chop suey.

Chop suey food