The Oldest Chinese Restaurant in America

[Randy W]

The oldest continuously operated Chinese restaurant in America is not in San Francisco or New York, but in Butte, Montana.

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The First Chinese Restaurant in America Has a Savory—and Unsavory—History
Venture into the Montana eatery, once a gambling den and opium repository, that still draws a crowd

The Pekin Noodle Parlor in Butte, Montana, serves what owner Jerry Tam calls “Chinese American comfort food.” Rebecca Stumpf
 

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The first Chinese immigrants came to Montana in the 1860s, working in the territory’s gold fields and helping build the railroads. Following close behind them were Chinese businessmen and their families, many of whom settled in Butte, the economic hub for mining activity. They established a thriving six-block Chinatown adjacent to downtown, with laundries, tailors, general stores, herbal medicine shops, noodle parlors, gambling parlors and opium dens. It was the primary source of supplies and entertainment for the Chinese miners who lived in nearby camps. The 1870 census counted nearly 2,000 Chinese residents in Montana, or 10 percent of the territory’s population. By comparison, the same census counted a mere 500 or so Chinese immigrants in New York City.

Tam’s great-great-grandfather, Tam Kwong Yee, who founded the restaurant, was born in Guangzhou, China, and immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s via San Francisco. He moved to Butte in 1909 with a business partner named Hum Yow and Yow’s wife, Bessie. “They were well-to-do people with family ties in the same village in China,” Tam says, and they came to Butte because by then it was a booming city of 100,000 people, ripe with economic opportunity. A gigantic deposit of copper was being mined right outside the city limits, in what locals called the “Richest Hill on Earth.”

Yee and the Yows arrived to find a town riven by anti-Chinese prejudice. Chinese people were barred from working in the copper mines, and there had even been campaigns to evict them from Butte, including an aggressive union-organized boycott of Chinese American businesses in 1896 and 1897. A group of Chinese businessmen won a court injunction against the boycott, so Butte remained attractive to Chinese entrepreneurs, despite such obstacles as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—the first race-based immigration law in U.S. history, which suspended Chinese immigration and made Chinese immigrants ineligible for naturalization. The law was not repealed until 1943.

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He walks downstairs into the dark, dusty rooms and flicks on a light switch. “This was the epicenter of the Pekin,” he says. He walks through three rooms that served as an illegal gambling parlor. Using the flashlight on his phone, he points out dusty poker tables, slot machines, an old roulette wheel, keno tickets with Chinese characters translated into English numerals and a metal casino cage that protected the cashier and the money. “Millions and millions of dollars passed through here, from around 1911 until the 1950s,” Tam says. There were occasional police raids, during which the proprietors would kill the lights and usher gamblers into a network of tunnels that connected speakeasies, brothels and restaurants. Tourists can still explore these tunnels today.