Panda Express Founder Hopes to be in China Again Someday

“One day I would like to be in China,” Panda Express co-owner Andrew Cherng tells KCET in an interview about the origins and future of America’s largest chain of Asian fast food restaurants. “That would be a big deal.”

What Cherng might also have said is that his ambition to take Panda Express, which has a popular restaurant on 1216 Fair Oaks Ave., to China would bring him back to his ancestral motherland, where, indeed, he once lived.

Cherng, who lives in South Pasadena, immigrated to the United States in 1966, along with his father, Master Chef Ming-Tsai Cherng, and “scraped together loans to open the first Panda Inn in a modest stand-alone building surrounded by ample parking lots on Foothill Avenue just east of Sierra Madre Villa,” according to KCET.

Click here to read the full interview.