The man who made Panda Express possible never heard the name Panda Express. He was an illiterate peasant from the countryside outside Yangzhou, China, one of the great culinary capitals of the world, a city UNESCO designated a creative city of gastronomy, who never spent a day in school, taught himself to cook in kitchens across China, Taiwan, and Japan, and died of cancer in 1981 in a California hospital before anyone outside Pasadena knew his name.
He never saw a second restaurant location, never tasted the orange chicken that traces its DNA directly to his tangerine peel chicken recipe, and never knew that tens of millions of Americans would one day eat food descended from his kitchen every year. His son Andrew and daughter-in-law Peggy built a $7.
5 billion empire from what he left behind, and 40 years after his death, his photograph still greets diners who walk through the door of the original restaurant. Thus, on today’s episode of Old Money Luxury, we examine the tragic family behind the cheery orange logo, a story of war, displacement, an illiterate chef’s genius, a grief-driven expansion, and a $100 million gift to the cancer hospital that tried to save him.
Andrew and Peggy Cherng’s combined net worth is estimated at $7.5 billion as of 2025, built entirely from Panda Restaurant Group, which operates more than 2,400 Panda Express locations globally alongside the original Panda Inn sit-down restaurants, generating system-wide revenues that have made Panda Express the largest Asian restaurant chain in the United States, and one of the most recognizable fast food brands in the country, a chain so ubiquitous that its orange chicken has become the single most widely consumed
Chinese American dish in history. In an era when fast food growth almost universally depends on franchising, where brands like McDonald’s, Subway, and Jersey Mike’s achieve scale by selling the right to operate under their name to independent owners, the Chungs have never franchised a single location, retaining ownership and operational control of every restaurant bearing their name through the Chung family trust.
Founded in 2001 and valued at approximately 3.1 billion dollars in assets. This is an extraordinary organizational commitment that requires vastly more corporate infrastructure than franchising, but gives the family a level of control over their brand that no franchisor can match. And it means that every labor practice, every quality decision, and every customer experience across 2400 locations is the direct responsibility of the family whose patriarch died before the first Panda Express ever opened its doors.
The decision to retain ownership of every location has shaped the company’s growth trajectory in ways that are invisible to the customer standing in line for orange chicken, but fundamental to how the business operates. Panda Restaurant Group employs tens of thousands of workers directly, rather than relying on independent franchisees to hire and manage staff, absorbs the full capital cost of every new store opening, >> >> rather than collecting franchise fees from operators who bear the financial
risk, and maintain centralized control over menu development, ingredient sourcing, and operational standards that would be far more difficult to enforce through franchise agreements. Two of Andrew and Peggy’s three daughters have taken roles within the company. Andrea Chung serves as chief marketing officer, and Nicole Chung works in catering and special events, meaning the third generation is now actively shaping a brand whose recipes trace back to a grandfather they knew only through the dishes he left behind,
carried in memory because he could not write them down. The deeper corporate controversies, too sensitive for this video, including the 2021 lawsuit alleging that employees were required to attend seminars described as cult-like initiation rituals as prerequisites for promotion, the federal racial discrimination class action, and the Department of Justice settlement over immigration-related employment practices fills our free Substack newsletter.
We examine how a family that fled the Chinese Civil War, colonial Burma, and post-war Japan built the largest Asian restaurant chain in America without selling a single franchise, and why the $100 million gift to City of Hope Cancer Center was not corporate philanthropy, but a son’s attempt to honor the father who died before the empire existed.
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The story begins in Yangzhou, one of the most food-obsessed cities on Earth, in the final catastrophic year of the Chinese Civil War. Andrew Cherng was born in April 1948 in Yangzhou, in the Jiangsu province of China, a city on the northern bank of the Yangtze River whose culinary traditions date back to the Sui Dynasty, and whose Huaiyang cuisine is celebrated for knife technique described as thin as paper, slender as a wire, a tradition so significant that UNESCO designated Yangzhou a creative city of gastronomy
in 2019, one of only four cities in China to hold that status. His arrival coincided almost precisely with the final catastrophic phase of the Chinese Civil War. When Communist troops captured Nanjing, the Nationalist capital located only 50 miles west of Yangzhou, in April 1949, the government collapsed and more than 2 million people fled to Taiwan, flooding an island of 6 million that had its own scars from decades of Japanese colonial rule.
Andrew’s father, Ming Tsai Chuan, hailed from the rural countryside outside Yangzhou, not from the city’s educated elite, but from its farming peasantry. And as Andrew later revealed, his father never went to school, was an illiterate man who taught himself to cook by entering kitchen work at a very young age out of pure necessity.
Ming Tsai’s path from peasant to master chef was forged entirely through observation, practice, and hardship. In Taiwan, he worked his way through kitchens in Taipei, >> >> learning Mandarin and Sichuan cuisine through hands-on apprenticeship in a profession where skill was visible and illiteracy was no barrier.
Building enough of a reputation to secure work as a chef in Japan, >> >> despite the cultural gulf and raw wartime memories between the two countries. In 1963, the entire Chuan family relocated to Yokohama, their third country in roughly 15 years, where Ming Tsai had secured a position as head chef at a hotel.
And it was there that Andrew first entered a kitchen professionally, arranged by his father to work in a restaurant in Yokohama’s Chinatown while still a high school student. It was grunt work in a hot kitchen for a teenager navigating adolescence in a foreign country whose language he was still learning. >> >> But it planted something that would define his life, because Andrew watched his father command a kitchen and learned from the inside what a restaurant was, not as a diner, but as a worker in its machinery.
The city that produced Andrew Chuan and from which his father carried his culinary education was not a random starting point. The most famous export of Yangzhou’s kitchen, Yangzhou fried rice, was chosen to be served at at founding ceremony of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the very government that had driven the Chungs into exile.
The same culinary tradition that forced the family out of their homeland would become the foundation of everything they built in America. But first, Andrew would have to get there alone at 18 with no money and no English to a small college in Kansas where he would meet the woman whose engineering career would one day make the whole empire possible.
In 1966, 18-year-old Andrew Cherng left Japan and immigrated to the United States alone to attend Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, a small liberal arts college of about 900 students in the rural Midwest where he studied mathematics starting from nothing with no American network, no family nearby, and no safety net.
To survive through college and graduate school at the University of Missouri where he earned a master’s degree in applied mathematics in 1972, Andrew worked every summer and most holidays waiting tables at Chinese restaurants in New York City, six summers of relentlessly demanding work through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, scraping together enough money to keep himself in school in a city where his English was imperfect and New Yorkers were, in his own words, ruthless.
After six summers, his cousin, who had also been working in New York, decided to open a restaurant in Washington D.C. and Andrew became its manager beginning the chain of events that would lead eventually to Panda Inn and the family empire that followed. At Baker, Andrew met Peggy Cherng born in 1947 or 48 in Moulmein, Myanmar, then under British colonial rule to Chinese parents in the Sino-Burmese diaspora community who made the decision to leave when Burma’s independence brought political hostility toward ethnic
minorities and immigrant communities. Peggy’s family relocated to Hong Kong, itself then a British Crown Colony absorbing tens of thousands of refugees from mainland China and additional waves from Burma, Vietnam, and elsewhere. And her family encouraged her to pursue higher education at a time when this was, in her own words, a rarity for women in Myanmar.
A decision that required both unusual family priorities and exceptional individual drive in a world where most women of her generation had no access to university education regardless of intellect. She transferred from Baker to Oregon State University for her bachelor’s in applied mathematics, then returned to the University of Missouri for a master’s in computer science and a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1974.
Her doctoral dissertation developed a pattern recognition program that digitized x-rays and applied algorithms to diagnose congenital heart disease. A technically sophisticated and medically meaningful piece of research that demonstrated she was genuinely gifted in a field where women were rare and immigrant women were nearly invisible.
Two immigrants, each having already lived through war, colonial transition, and forced migration across multiple countries, found each other in a small Kansas town. Andrew, the son of a Chinese refugee chef who had fled a communist revolution. Peggy, the daughter of Chinese parents who had fled colonial Burma, different countries and different displacements, but the same essential story of dislocation.
After earning her doctorate, Peggy joined McDonnell Douglas coding battlefield simulators for the US Air Force, then moved to Comptek Corporation, a subsidiary of 3M, where she rose to software development manager. A trajectory toward a senior career in American technology and defense >> >> that she would deliberately abandon in 1982 when Andrew’s father died and the restaurant needed her engineering mind more than the military needed her code.
After completing his master’s degree, Andrew moved to Los Angeles to work at his cousin’s restaurant for $800 a month and after serious disagreements with the cousin made the situation untenable, he borrowed money and combined it with a small business administration loan to scrape together approximately $60,000 in total capital.
On June 8th, 1973, Panda Inn opened at 3488 East Foothill Boulevard in Pasadena. The entire Cheung family poured everything into it >> >> with Andrew, his father Ming Tsai, his mother, his brother and his sister all working for free, unwilling to draw salaries until the restaurant could sustain itself, all living together in a small two-bedroom apartment nearby.
Andrew was confident the food would carry them. He had spent years watching his father cook and eaten at Chinese restaurants across the country during his New York summers and he believed Panda Inn’s Mandarin and Szechuan menu was genuinely superior to the Cantonese cuisine that dominated Southern California’s Chinese restaurant scene.
I was so sure that we were going to do well because I know our food. So when we opened, I thought, “We’re going to kick butt.” But the customers did not come easily. In those first agonizing weeks, Andrew would stand near the window and watch pedestrians peer into the restaurant and then walk away because the concept of upscale non-Cantonese Chinese cuisine in a Pasadena dining room was genuinely unfamiliar to most potential customers who associated Chinese food entirely with the takeout Cantonese cooking of earlier
immigrant generations. His mother, watching the empty tables in barely concealed desperation, went out onto the sidewalk and scattered salt, a traditional Chinese ritual believed to ward off bad spirits and invite good fortune. It was all she had to offer. What slowly turned the tide was Ming Tsai’s kitchen.
His tangerine peel chicken, his sizzling beef hot plates, his Chinese pasta noodle dishes designed to ease American diners into a cuisine most of them had never encountered outside of Cantonese takeout. Food rooted in Yangzhou and Sichuan traditions, but adapted with enough accessibility to build a local following one customer at a time.
After eight years of grinding effort, Panda Inn had become a genuine community favorite in Pasadena. And then, in 1981, Ming Tsai Cherng died of cancer at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. He was in his late 50s or early 60s. The precise age is not publicly documented, and the timing is almost unbearably cruel in retrospect, because the years of working for free, of squeezing a family into a two-bedroom apartment, of watching pedestrians walk away, were finally behind them.
Ming Tsai was cooking in his element, in his own restaurant, on his own terms, and then he was gone. Most families, having lost their patriarch and the chef on whom the entire enterprise depended, would have contracted. The Cherngs expanded because a real estate developer who loved Panda Inn’s food was about to make them an offer they had no reason to accept, except that grief and ambition in this family had always moved together.
The chain reaction that produced Panda Express was not a business plan. It was a friendship born of grief-interrupted momentum. While running Panda Inn, Andrew had become acquainted with Terry Donahue, then the head football coach at UCLA, whose brother Dan worked in real estate and was involved with the Glendale Galleria shopping mall.
Dan had eaten at Panda Inn and loved it. And when the mall’s second phase was being built in 1982 and ’83, the development group invited the Chungs to open a fast-food version in the new food court. The invitation arrived at an extraordinarily charged moment. Ming-Tsai had died the year before, the family was still in grief, and the future of the enterprise was uncertain.
But Andrew and Peggy pounced on the opportunity. And in October 1983, the first Panda Express opened inside the Glendale Galleria food court across from a Hot Dog on a Stick stand. The entire second act of the Chung story, the fast-food empire, the billion-dollar revenues, the 2,400 locations, were set in motion during the months immediately following Ming-Tsai’s death.
>> >> Grief and ambition moving together inseparably. When Peggy joined the business full-time in ’82, leaving behind her position as software development manager at Comtal Corporation, she brought her engineering mind to bear on restaurant operations that were inefficient, improvised, and manually tracked at a time >> >> when almost no restaurant in the country operated with computerized systems, and most independent restaurateurs >> >> saw no need for such technology.
By ’83, she had introduced what the Chungs later claimed was one of the first point-of-sale systems used anywhere in the restaurant industry. “It was confusing at the beginning, especially when everyone got nervous and pressed the wrong buttons,” she said later. But it made everything more efficient. Peggy built the system to monitor inventory, anticipate ingredient reorders, >> >> and generate data on customer behavior and purchasing patterns simultaneously.
Using her background developing battlefield simulators for the US Air Force at McDonnell Douglas to build a restaurant operations infrastructure that was years ahead of the industry. This infrastructure, invisible to customers yet responsible for the consistency that allowed Panda Express to grow from one mall food court unit to hundreds of locations, was built by a woman >> >> who had been coding aerospace software for the military just months before.
In 1987, in-house chef Andy Kao devised orange chicken in a Panda Express kitchen in Hawaii, drawing direct conceptual lineage from the tangerine peel chicken Ming Tsai had been serving since 1973, a culinary evolution that connected a mall food court in Honolulu to a peasant kitchen in Yangzhou across four decades and three continents.
Every year, tens of millions of Americans walk into a Panda Express and order a dish whose ancestry runs through a Pasadena kitchen, a Yokohama hotel, a Taipei apprenticeship, and a village outside Yangzhou. And the family that profits from every one of those meals has spent the last four decades trying to repay a debt to the cancer hospital where the man who started it all spent his final days.
Every Panda Express location on Earth is owned and operated by the Cheng family, a commitment to direct control that has cost them billions in foregone franchise fees, but that Andrew considers non-negotiable because ownership means accountability, and accountability means the family name is attached to every meal served in every restaurant.
Andrew has spoken about keeping the early years fresh in his mind as a management philosophy. The memory of being broke in a two-bedroom apartment with the family working for free appears to have never fully left him. And Peggy has described leaving her corporate engineering career not as a sacrifice, but as a partnership decision, building something together rather than separately accumulating credentials.
In 2023, Andrew and Peggy Cherng donated $100 million to City of Hope National Medical Center, the single largest philanthropic contribution for cancer care in the hospital’s history, establishing the Cherng Family Center for Integrative Oncology designed to combine acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, >> >> and other Eastern practices with conventional Western cancer treatments.
“City of Hope was the hope,” Andrew said at the announcement. “They took care of him and took care of him very well.” Words spoken by a billionaire about the institution that had tried to save his father 40 years earlier, a man who had died of cancer at a relatively young age in the eighth year of the restaurant he had spent his life preparing to build.
The specific nature of the gift, integrating Eastern and Western medicine, reflects directly on the family’s identity. Andrew’s father was a man trained in Chinese culinary and healing traditions who died in an American cancer center. And Peggy, born in Burma and raised in Hong Kong, brought deep connections to Eastern healing traditions that informed their conviction that the best cancer care would combine the strengths of both medical systems rather than treating them as incompatible.
The donation is, in a profound way, a monument to Ming Tsai Cherng, a man who embodied the fusion of East and West, who spent his final years cooking in a Pasadena restaurant that had taken 8 years to find its audience, and whose son carried the memory of that hospital room for four decades before writing the check.
The Cherngs’ total philanthropy exceeds $400 million, including 30 million to Caltech, 25 million to Huntington Hospital, 17 million to Saint Rose Dominican Hospital in 2025 and the presenting sponsorship of the Special Olympics USA Games. And it reads as a family channeling the proceeds of an empire that patriarch never saw into the institutions that might have saved him if they had existed in their current form when he needed them most.
When the original Pasadena Panda Inn was renovated and reopened in 2024, a photograph of Ming Tsai cooking over fire was placed at the entrance. The first thing diners see when they walk through the door 43 years after his death in the restaurant he built with his hands and his recipes and his genius that no school ever taught him.
And now we’d love to hear from you in the comments. Is Panda Express a triumph or a tragedy or somehow both? We look forward to the discussion below and thanks for joining us for another episode of Old Money Luxury. Cheers.
