Field Research
Documented across 9 countries and 5 continents — Chinese immigrant families running restaurants in the world's most unlikely places. From 71°N in Arctic Alaska to the southernmost city on earth. These are the places this book is about.
Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska · 71°N
Possibly the northernmost Chinese restaurant in the United States, operating at 71° north latitude. Korean-Chinese-Alaskan fusion with ocean views. Soy sauce, sugar, and creamer on the tables instead of alcohol — a reflection of the dry community it serves.
Kotzebue, Alaska · Pop. 3,200
Family-run in one of the most remote communities accessible only by air or sea. Serves reindeer stew alongside Chinese staples — a menu shaped entirely by Arctic geography. Delivery available despite the isolation.
Nome, Alaska · Pop. 3,500
235 Front St. Family-owned operation that reopened after an earlier closure — a testament to community need in this remote gold-rush town on the Bering Sea coast. Nome is accessible only by air or seasonal barge.
Sitka, Alaska · Pop. 8,400
327 Seward St. One of the few restaurants in an island city with no road connections to the mainland. Covers Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean BBQ — a broad menu shaped by a community that can't afford to be picky about cuisine boundaries.
Juneau, Alaska · Pop. 32,000
Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese cuisine in Alaska's capital — a city with no road to the outside world. Online ordering available. A reminder that even state capitals can be genuinely remote when geography decides.
Butte, Montana · Pop. 34,000
The oldest continuously-operating Chinese restaurant in the United States. Family-run since 1911 — over 113 years. Current owner Jerry Tam is the 5th generation. The basement preserves a time capsule of Chinese-American immigration: original wood-lined cooler, 1914 refrigerator still in use, and a family archive spanning more than a century in a Montana copper-mining town.
Miles City, Montana · Pop. 8,400
1711 S Haynes Ave. Family-owned operation in a ranching town at the edge of the plains. Known for fresh garden vegetables in season — an adaptation that speaks to the family's commitment to place rather than just to a cuisine.
Livingston, Montana · Pop. 7,100
102 N 2nd St (relocated to the Stockman Bar building, Nov 2024). Authentic Sichuan in a gateway town for Yellowstone, serving a community that has supported this family for over 30 years through location changes and all.
Sheridan, Wyoming · Pop. 17,400
2091 S Sheridan Ave. Family-owned since 1995 — nearly three decades serving a Wyoming ranching community in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains. The kind of restaurant that outlasts the businesses around it by simply refusing to leave.
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories · Pop. 20,000
5010 50th St. Operating since 1940 — 86 years in the Canadian Arctic. A legendary underground Chinese buffet that has fed generations of miners, government workers, and northern wilderness travelers. The subterranean setting and northern lights above make it one of the most visually distinctive locations in this research.
Whitehorse, Yukon · Pop. 36,000
206 Jarvis St. Family-friendly anchor in the Yukon's only city, serving fried rice, ginger beef, and chow mein to a community that includes miners, government workers, and the First Nations communities of the territory. Gold Rush history embedded in every plate.
Reykjavik, Iceland · Pop. 128,000
Iceland's first Chinese restaurant, open since 1982. Now operating three locations across the island (Laugavegur 60, Pósthússtræti 13 in Reykjavik; one in Akureyri). A 44-year presence in one of the most geographically isolated nations in the world, shaping how an entire country thinks about Chinese food.
Reykjavik, Iceland · 9,000 km from owner's hometown
Owner Liu arrived in Reykjavik 17 years ago — 9,000 kilometers from home — and opened this restaurant on a mission to educate Icelandic palates about authentic Sichuan cuisine. Hand-pleated dumplings, fresh noodles, and Icelandic lamb prepared with Chinese technique. The distance between origin and plate is the whole story.
Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina · Pop. 57,000
The southernmost Chinese restaurant in the world, operating at the literal end of the earth. Specializes in king crab and local Patagonian seafood prepared with Chinese technique — a cuisine fusion that only makes sense at this latitude, where the ocean is both impossibly cold and impossibly abundant.
El Calafate, Patagonia, Argentina · Pop. 16,000
An all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet where Patagonian lamb shares the steam trays with lo mein and fried rice. The gateway to Perito Moreno Glacier — one of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet — runs through a dining room that refuses to choose between two culinary traditions.
Punta Arenas, Chile · Pop. 128,000
José Nogueira 1183. Family-run Chinese cuisine in the southernmost city in Chile — a city that existed as a wool-shipping hub at the edge of the Strait of Magellan before most of the world had heard of it. Chinese families followed the same trade routes.
Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia · −60°F winters
Ulitsa Bogatyreva 8. Chinese and Japanese cuisine in the world's coldest major city — where January temperatures regularly hit −60°F and the permafrost runs hundreds of meters deep. Yakutsk is largely inaccessible by road for half the year. That a Chinese restaurant operates here at all is the story.
Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia · −60°F winters
Chinese, Japanese, and Asian fusion with a 4.6-star rating in a city most people couldn't find on a map. The panda and the crane — the restaurant's name pulls from both Chinese and Russian symbolic tradition, a small act of translation between two cultures sharing an impossible climate.
Hilo, Hawaii · Big Island
530 E Lanikaula St. 51 years of family Cantonese cooking in a Big Island city that's closer to Alaska by water than it is to Los Angeles. A community staple since 1975, serving the kind of straightforward, honest Chinese-American food that has fed generations of island families.
Hilo, Hawaii · Big Island
1263 Kilauea Ave. Cantonese family cooking with an emphasis on fresh steamed local fish — the kind of dish that only works when the cook knows where the fish came from. 28 years of family ownership in the rainy, volcanic, overlooked side of the Big Island.
Queenstown, New Zealand · Pop. 42,000
Chinese dining on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, surrounded by the Remarkables mountain range. A tourist gateway that nevertheless sustains a Chinese family restaurant serving both visitors and a local community at the far southern end of a remote South Pacific island.
Queenstown, New Zealand · The Mall
34 Ballarat St, above the shops. A hidden gem fusing Shanghai and Taipei culinary traditions in a ski resort town at the southern tip of New Zealand. The kind of place visitors stumble into expecting something ordinary and leave having eaten something they'll describe for years.
Castries, St. Lucia · Pop. 20,000
St Louis St. Part of an established Chinese community presence in St. Lucia — one of the more overlooked chapters of Chinese diaspora history. Chinese merchants and restaurateurs arrived in the Caribbean in waves during the 19th and 20th centuries and never fully left. This is one of the places they stayed.
Bridgetown, Barbados · Pop. 110,000
Described by locals as the best Chinese restaurant on the island. Family-run, affordable, with a varied menu that serves Barbados the way Chinese restaurants have always served island and small-town communities everywhere: dependably, without pretense, for decades.
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