A coffee table book photographing the Chinese-American families running restaurants in the most remote corners of the country. Starting with Alaska.
There are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's combined. Some exist in towns of fewer than 200 people, thousands of miles from the nearest Chinatown.
"General Tso at the Edge" sends photographers to the margins of American geography to document the families behind these restaurants. The neon glow against Alaskan snow. The handwritten menus in towns that don't have a stoplight. The kids doing homework at the back table while their parents cook for the whole town.
This isn't a food book. It's a book about people who carried a culture across an ocean and planted it in places nobody expected. The format is premium: large-format photography, intimate interviews, and the kind of production quality that earns a permanent place on your table.
Large-format environmental portraits and landscapes. The contrast between vast, frozen terrain and the warmth of a family kitchen. Professional photographers embedded with each restaurant family.
First-person interviews with the families. How they got there. What they gave up. What they built. Short-form narratives that give the photographs depth and voice.
The first volume focuses on Alaska, where the distance between restaurants can be measured in hundreds of miles, and the stories are as wild as the landscape. More volumes to follow.
The generation that built these restaurants, the ones who arrived with nothing and opened kitchens in towns they couldn't pronounce, is aging out. Their children are going to college, moving to cities, choosing different lives. This isn't a critique. It's what happens.
But when the last family-run Chinese restaurant closes in a town of 300 people in the Alaskan interior, something irreplaceable goes with it. This book exists to preserve that moment before it's gone.
The most American story is an immigrant family feeding a small town that isn't sure what to make of them, and staying anyway.