The Panda Way

The largest Chinese restaurant company in the United States was built by two people, and only one of them ever gave an interview.

Andrew Cherng arrived at a small college in Kansas in 1966 speaking almost no English, and spent a lifetime on a single idea: that a person is unfinished and can be improved. He said it to anyone who would sit still, for four decades, in rooms full of people who worked counters. It made him a billionaire. It also, eventually, made him a defendant.

Peggy Cherng took a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1974, on teaching a machine to find the shape that matters inside a noisy grey image. When a mall developer asked her husband's family whether they could make a fast version of what they were doing, her answer was not about the food. Point-of-sale systems were barely a commercial product in 1982, so she built one. What she built is the reason a single counter in Glendale became more than two thousand restaurants, and it is the half of the story nobody has told.

The Panda Way follows both instruments from a Pasadena dining room to a five-billion-dollar company that has never franchised a store, never listed a share, and never entered China. It follows orange chicken from a Honolulu kitchen in 1987 to the most-ordered dish in American restaurants. And it follows a creed of self-improvement from a borrowed letter read five times in an empty dormitory to a Saturday seminar room, a legal filing, and a private arbitration whose record the public cannot read.

This is a business story about the thing that makes a company work being the same thing that puts it in court, and it refuses to resolve into a verdict because the evidence does not.

An independent, unauthorized work. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Andrew Cherng, Peggy Cherng, or Panda Restaurant Group, Inc.