How did the old Chinese restaurants become so ubiquitous in American culture? Prior to the 1980s, over 40,000 Chinese-American restaurants supplied the USA with dishes like Egg Foo Young, Sweet and Sour Pork, Chicken Chow Mein, and Moo Goo Gai Pan. All these iconic dishes were Americanized versions of Cantonese foods. This book describes how this phenomenon took place and contains over 150 recipes so that you can replicate the dishes of The Golden Hour Restaurant.

The Golden Hour is representative of these historic restaurants which not only prospered in large cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Dallas, but also in small towns like Turlock, where The Golden Hour was located in California’s agricultural Central Valley. These old Americanized Chinese restaurants have largely been replaced by more authentic Chinese cuisines. These older dishes and restaurants are on the verge of extinction as the subsequent generations growing up in these restaurants sought other professions. This book presents the culture, stories, and the recipes of this phenomenon.