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.

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.