Illustration by Joaquin Kunkel

SHANGHAI, China — “Build it and they will come,” read the strip of paper inside the fortune cookie that marked the end of my first, and last, Chinese-American dinner in Shanghai. Coincidentally, the restaurant was called Fortune Cookie, and it was self-proclaimed to be the only restaurant in Shanghai serving authentic Chinese-American food.

Located near Shanghai's Jing’an Temple, Fortune Cookie is yet another addition to the area’s expat and tourist attractions. With its Fortune Cat statue and stacks of paper takeaway boxes with drawings of red pagodas, the restaurant feels like a caricature; the archetype of every Chinese restaurant in the West. But Fortune Cookie is well aware of this resemblance. Owners Fung Lam and Dave Rossi aimed at recreating what they thought was the quintessential American neighborhood Chinese restaurant experience.

In doing so, Lam and Rossi are not only providing nostalgia-stricken expats with the Chinese meals they grew up with, but are also showing the locals how Chinese cuisine has been transformed and adapted in the United States.

There are two elements that make Fortune Cookie an interesting phenomenon in the Shanghai food scene. The first is its claim to be representative of an authentic Chinese-American tradition. Second, it is the first restaurant that is intentionally bringing this cuisine to Shanghai. Now, there is nothing new about bringing home reinventions of local dishes: Tex-Mex restaurants Señor Frog’s and Carlos’ n’ Charlie’s have opened their doors in Mexico, and Domino’s Pizza has outlets in Milan. But as this phenomenon starts to take root in Shanghai, we might stop and ponder about the conditions that allow a Chinese-American restaurant to successfully establish itself in the most populated city in China.

The story of Fortune Cookie is one of nostalgia. After a failed attempt at opening a health-based food operation in Shanghai, founders Fung Lam and Dave Rossi apparently found themselves without a path. Living in a foreign city, feeling the burden of failure, Lam said, “... the one thing I was missing was just stuffing my face with lo mein and chicken and broccoli, and I was a half a world away from any of that.”

The food his parents served in the many restaurants they had opened in the United States during the past 30 years was his idea of comfort food. While living in Shanghai, the Chinese cuisine both Lam and Rossi had grown up eating became an impossible desire. They both attribute the creation of Fortune Cookie to the longing of being able to provide that comfort food to the many expats who perhaps found themselves in a similar situation.

Lam and Rossi espouse a fairly simple vision for their business: a nostalgia-driven operation that exploits the most sentimental aspects of the Chinese restaurant in the United States, to give the customer the sensation that they are back in their neighborhood grabbing a family meal. After some scouring for the perfect site to set up shop, they opened doors in 2013.

The restaurant inevitably resembles a typical U.S. American diner. The dining room is a long strip of blue leather sofas and dark wooden tables from where you can see the cooks handling huge woks and fashioning chef jackets behind a glass window. The waitresses are mostly young and dressed up in t-shirts filled with pop culture references. The menu consists of what might be thought of as the all-time hits of Chinese-American cuisine: from General Tso beef to fried ice cream. All the recipes come from Lam’s father’s restaurant emporium, one that spreads all the way from New Jersey to Texas.

It has taken Fortune Cookie a while to establish its identity. Locals and expats experience the restaurant differently. For expats, the restaurant is a gateway to home. For locals, Fortune Cookie provides a foreign, almost exotic experience. They see in the restaurant the traces of the U.S. American culture to which they have access through the media. There have even been cases of locals asking for their food to be served in white cardboard takeaway containers, mimicking meals they've seen on sitcoms like Friends and The Big Bang Theory.

According to Lam, the perceived exoticism of the restaurant does not subtract from the seriousness of the concept. For Lam, Fortune Cookie is just another chapter in a forty-year tradition of Chinese-American kitchens, of which his family is one of many protagonists. The Chinese immigrants who brought their culinary traditions to the United States ended up creating a new tradition when having to adjust to the locally-available ingredients and a different customer palate. Fortune Cookie aims at remaining loyal to that style and labels itself as authentic.

Lam and Rossi have spent most of their efforts making sure that the food they serve tastes like and looks like the food Lam’s father serves back home. This requires them to import many ingredients, or buy them at supermarket price.

But it doesn’t just take the ingredients to guarantee authenticity — the preparation itself is one of the most difficult parts. Rossi and Lam flew Lam’s father all the way to Shanghai so that he would teach the Chinese cooks how to prepare Chinese food the U.S. American way. Standardization and consistency are very important components of Lam’s father’s style. Many of the cooks were not used to measuring every single ingredient when preparing a dish. In fact, it took the kitchen weeks of trial and error before arriving at a satisfying final product.

One of the most significant obstacles they encountered had to do with the texture of the breading they used for many of their fried dishes. The consistency just wasn't right and it did not look or taste like it did back home.

"I finally discovered that our cooks were using wheat starch instead of corn starch. They all refer to it by the same name here: fen, or powder," said Lam.

The fortune cookie posed a whole new challenge in itself. Anyone who has spent some time in China knows that meals don’t end with a sweet and crunchy cookie that encloses one phrase of wisdom. But the Chinese-American experience would never be complete without the special treat, which is actually Japanese in its origin.

For the restaurant, the quest for the fortune cookie in Shanghai was, to say the least, unfortunate. The messages from the first batch that they made arrived in Dutch. Since the company that provided the cookies would only sell them in bulk, the opening of the restaurant had to be delayed by a few weeks until they received usable fortune cookies.

Just like the first Chinese immigrants who set out to serve their food in the United States, Lam and Rossi have adapted to local conditions to provide a dining experience that makes them feel closer to home. Some might argue that they’ve brought their recipes back to where they belong. But the story didn’t come full circle. As with many other things in ever-changing Shanghai, it just started again.