They are golden and they are lucky. They are dragons, cities, and palaces. They pack up General Tso’s Chicken in plastic rectangular containers and white rice in white boxes. For low costs, bags are filled with big portions, ready for pickup in 10 minutes or delivery in 20. Most likely, on the sides of those bags is emblazoned, several times over and perhaps slanted or wiggly: “HAVE A NICE DAY.”
Americanized Chinese restaurants have always been both a victim and an upholder of stereotypes. In some extreme cases, I have witnessed accusations of cat hair on our food while working at my parents’ restaurant or people mocking our workers’ broken English, but to a certain extent, traditional Chinese takeout restaurants typically stick to the tried and true. Most of them prefer the same takeout box designs, their walls feature similar dim LED displays of food, and their menu items are numerous and alike.
Nice Day Chinese, a modern take on Chinese takeout, aims to champion the ideal of Americanized Chinese food—affordable, quick, savory—while embracing the stereotypes. The name itself plays upon the classic takeout bag, and its mascot is a silhouette of the golden fortune cat that presides over Chinese takeout restaurants, persistently waving its paw.
The newly-opened New Haven branch of Nice Day Chinese, located on Elm St. by Tomatillo and Maison B. Café, succeeds Ivy Wok, a takeout restaurant that for two decades provided warm comfort food for students after late night studying or partying at frat row. Yong Zhao, M.ES ’08, GRD ’14, M.Phil.’15, and Wanting Zhang, M.ES ’11, husband-wife CEO-COO duo of Nice Day Chinese, praised Ivy Wok as one of their favorites when they were graduate students at Yale.
Where Ivy Wok was dim and cozy inside, with humble orange walls and worn-in black chairs, Nice Day Chinese takes a step into the future: shiny white tables, a disco ball reflecting onto a cartoon mural, and a glowing red LED display of their cat mascot. Walking inside, their minimal and modern aesthetic distances the restaurant from tired stereotypes of Chinese takeout. Depending on the time of day, pop, techno, or jazz filters through the overhead speakers as the staff—mainly New Haveners—prompts you to order with a QR code.
With four branches and a fifth opening soon in West Haven, Nice Day Chinese was established in reaction to the decline of traditional Chinese takeout restaurants across the country, an optimistic attempt to preserve—and even proliferate—Chinese takeout as a staple in American culture. The children of Chinese immigrants are growing up to attend university and secure well-paying jobs, leaving their parents to retire and sell their restaurants.
Zhao and Zhang met at Peking University in Beijing, before coming to study at the Yale School of Environment; on campus, they met co-founders and received a startup grant to launch Junzi Kitchen. While he makes the directorial and marketing decisions, Zhang is in charge of executing them. “She’s the best multi-tasker I know,” Zhao said.
Their menu consists of traditional Americanized Chinese comfort food—General Tso’s chicken, fried rice, and chow fun—but also dim sum and more elaborate dishes like golden fish filet and soup dumplings. Their takeout bags can be spotted all around campus, and on a weekend night, wait times to get a seat can be up to an hour long. “Our design for Nice Day is: imagine a perfect local Chinese restaurant. So a perfect local Chinese restaurant is very local, which means American or local Chinese immigrants will find their food in the same place,” Zhao said.
The first time I visited, they invited me to join their dinner—steaming plates of egg and tomato, noodles, and beef. While we ate, Zhao showed me a video of the automated kitchen they are piloting at the Brooklyn Nice Day Chinese branch: a complex system of mechanical grabbers, pots, and tubes that prepares food and cleans up after itself. The kitchen was clearly efficient and ingenious, yet I was struck with unease by how the automation might forgo authenticity and intimacy. I thought back to my parents’ restaurant and how my mother was friends with all our regulars, who came every day to buy a lunch combo and catch up with her.
Zhao was quick to object: “It’s always easy to romanticize people’s work, especially local handwork. But if you’re the one who does the handwork, then there’s nothing to romanticize.”
I remember Sundays in my parents’ restaurant, hunched over a dozen boxes of freezing cold shrimp, peeling with numb and reddened fingers before going back to eighth grade the next day. I used to overload my schedule at school to avoid working, and my parents spent so much time at the restaurant that the smell of chicken wings permanently lingered on their clothes. Yet, however stressful and grueling, our work at the restaurant defined their lives and my childhood. To see it replaced by machinery chilled the warmth of my nostalgia.
But Zhao’s gaze was steely. I wonder if he was thinking of his family.
“It’s not by choice, it’s sacrifice. You can’t romanticize sacrifice.”
***
Among the Chinese diaspora, Fuzhounese people are praised for their tenacity and sacrificial hard work as restaurateurs. The reason an inordinate number of Chinese restaurants are owned by Fuzhounese immigrants, Zhao explained to me, is due to the “civil microfinance system” that they have established. Fujian, a mountainous and seaside province, has very little farmland for people to work. Villagers, in order to support their families, borrow and lend from each other to immigrate to America and start up businesses.
“I have so much admiration for Fuzhounese restaurateurs—they are so hard-working,” Zhang said. “They brought Chinese food to everybody in America.”
I never thought of my Fuzhounese parents as “restaurateurs”—the term seemed to apply only to owners of Michelin-Star restaurants who fret over aesthetics. The only plating my family’s restaurant cared about was how much white rice and beef and broccoli could be squished into a plastic container. But I realize now that it was an art, a balancing act: my parents raised two children and worked 80-hour weeks all while maintaining stock and cleanliness and staff.
The traditional Chinese takeout model is inefficient, labor-intensive, and plain back-breaking. Oil burns mark my parents’ arms, and my mom suffers from varicose veins in her legs; the doctor’s only prescription for her was to work less. Even if Americanized, cooking Chinese cuisine is not easy, and many takeout restaurants feature menus with hundreds of dishes that chefs must memorize. Owners hide a lot of their costs in overtime work and even child labor, Zhao said. “It’s just not gonna make money.”
However, Zhao emphasized the need for these types of humble takeout businesses. American consumers typically have never encountered traditional Chinese food, he said, and the Americanized Chinese restaurants are the “entry point.”
“Our food is the most important cultural communication: it’s not political,” Zhao said. “In today’s world, America needs more inspiration. . . . China, as one of the main competitors of America, will provide not only competition but also inspiration.”
With the relationships between Chinese immigrant restaurateurs and their customers poised to disappear, the brand trust of a chain restaurant may have to replace the trust of intimate friendships. “It’s not going to be 100% replaced. A lot of emotion will be lost,” Zhao said. “It’s a hard exchange, but it’s inevitable. Better than nothing.”
I left the restaurant after we finished eating, but not before Zhang handed me two coupons and a light-hearted offer for my parents to work there when they close down shop.
***
Over October Break, I brought my family to meet Zhao at the Nice Day Chinese branch in Brooklyn. I wanted to see the automated kitchen in person and also thought that my mom and relatives, always on the hunt for new business ideas, would be interested.
Zhao took us around the restaurant, which had no dining space, only a kitchen staffed by a little army of machines. As orders rushed in online, metal grabbers pulled ingredients from the fridge and dropped them into big rotating pots, which began mechanically stir-frying vegetables and meats as tubes fed in sauces and oil. A Chinese chef was present as the sole supervisor, occasionally pressing some buttons or preparing ingredients while a local worker packed up orders for pickup and delivery. They were calmly handling what seemed like an intense dinner rush—something that would take six people and buckets of sweat at my parent’s restaurant.
My family was fascinated by the contraptions, recording them at work and peering into the tubes and machinery. Sharing plates of Hunan Beef and noodles, Zhao answers their questions about profit margins, marketing strategies, and the future of Chinese takeout restaurants.
“We cannot just put ourselves in a box. We cannot just stay in history,” Zhao said to me back in New Haven. “I have the opportunity to change the narratives of Chinese food in America, to become the first public Chinese food company in America. To become the most important touch point of Chinese culture—this is a very historical point that I can try and become the helm of.”
Perhaps Zhao is a tech apologist. But the old guard is retiring, and someone—or something—needs to take up the mantle. Nostalgia-inclined people like me might occasionally miss the rustic charm of hole-in-the-wall and family-ran restaurants, but as Zhao said, “it’s not romantic, it’s hard work.”
Amidst generational shifts, Nice Day Chinese promises to continue the legacies of their predecessors. If its model proliferates, my parents can retire knowing that their vocation will survive—but without the grueling work and sacrifice. Chinese takeout will continue to introduce Americans to Chinese culture and unite communities.
If we need automation and outsourcing to achieve that, then I welcome this future.