Panda Express

Panda Express cooks American Chinese food in open woks across more than two and a half thousand US restaurants, plus Puerto Rico and Guam. The chain grew out of a sit-down Mandarin restaurant run by one family in California. Orange Chicken carries the board today, and one family still owns the company outright.

Panda Express history, the group that grew around it, and the shape of the US estate fill the section below.

Panda Express History

Andrew Cherng and his father, the master chef Ming-Tsai Cherng, opened Panda Inn in Pasadena, California, in 1973. Sit-down service ran that first dining room, over a card of Mandarin and Szechwan dishes cooked to order. A shopping-centre developer ate there and asked the family for a counter-service version he could drop into a food court. That request produced the first Panda Express, which opened inside the Glendale Galleria food court in 1983. Steam trays and a glass counter replaced the waiters. The wok behind it never changed.

Peggy Cherng joined the business and brought an engineering doctorate with her. Ordering, inventory and point-of-sale systems were hers, and they let a wok kitchen scale the way a burger line already could. Mall food courts carried the early growth. Free-standing restaurants with drive-thru lanes followed, and they are now the shape most people picture. Orange Chicken arrived in 1987 out of a Hawaii kitchen, where chef Andy Kao worked out the sweet chilli glaze.

Panda Restaurant Group now holds Panda Express alongside Panda Inn and the Hibachi-San counters. Ownership has never left the founding family, and no outside investor has ever taken a stake. The company remains private today, with Andrew and Peggy Cherng sitting as co-chief executives over a workforce of roughly fifty-five thousand people. Restaurants now reach every corner of the country, from suburban drive-thru lanes and shopping centres through to airport concourses and college campuses. California alone accounts for close to a quarter of them.

Panda Express Menus & Details

Three pages carry the detail behind the glass. Each one puts an item name and the figures that belong to it on the same row.

The full wok line, section by section, with a price and a calorie figure beside every scoop.

Off-menu builds, the words to use at the counter, and the board item each one rings up as.

Wheat, soy, milk, egg, shellfish, fish, peanuts and tree nuts named against each item.