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Being from Michigan means you can turn your hand into an upright mitten and quickly and proudly point to your hometown. But when you really want to show your Michigan—especially your Metro Detroit—bona fides, you bring up a dish that is beset with arguments about where it came from, the ideal way to prepare it, and even what color its sauce should be.
Almond boneless chicken is as Detroit as Motown and white flight. It’s not Instagram-friendly or pretty to look at. Almond boneless chicken looks as if somebody lost a scuffle with a gravy boat and Marie Callender’s. A thick chicken breast, housed in crunchy golden batter and cut into strips like thick, broken piano keys, sits atop shredded lettuce. A broad stripe of brown (sometimes yellow) gravy drapes over it. Some slivered almonds are tossed on top. It’s a Chinese restaurant order that when mentioned to any Michigander lights up their faces, and it is most definitely the one dish Detroiters agree belongs to them. Everything beyond that is a fight.
My strongest almond chicken memory takes place at the now-defunct Hoy Tin restaurant on East Jefferson, a softly red-lit spot overlooking the Detroit River. In front of me and my newly divorced mom is the restaurant’s famed pupu platter, glistening on a lazy Susan. Next to us is my mom’s new best friend Mary Lou, also a divorcée, with a sweep of white hair in her gray. (She would later sing a tearful version of “Send in the Clowns” at Pinky’s piano bar, also on Jefferson.) My mom orders egg foo young, and I get my plate of almond boneless chicken. These were among a handful of dishes we were allowed to eat outside my mom’s Italian American cooking. ABC didn’t stray too far from our familiar chicken cutlets. But it strayed enough to make an impression.
The dish, I should say, is … fine. Beige on beige on beige. My emotional attachment to it, however, is not as restrained. When I left Michigan and realized I could not find this dish elsewhere, I suddenly wanted to know everything about it. My entire childhood seemed to depend on learning how this plate got locked up in Michigan (and, arguably, parts of Ohio?). Who first put it together, and why did something so ubiquitous here barely register elsewhere? I went looking for the source. But it turns out that hunting for this dish’s origin story gets you caught up in somebody else’s memories of their grandmother or father, their own childhood, and the Detroit they once knew.
Curtis Chin grew up with a definitive answer to almond boneless chicken’s birth. His family’s Detroit restaurant, Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, operated for 60 years. His memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, is organized around the restaurant’s menu. Almond boneless chicken gets pride of place.
“My grandmother invented it,” Chin told me. “I never questioned it.”
His grandmother was such a force in his family that if she said she cooked up the first plate of ABC, that was pretty much that. Her explanation, as much as Chin remembers it, also makes perfect sense. She lived in Detroit, saw people eating fried chicken with gravy, and made something they would order.
Chin sees the dish as an early Detroit fusion, shaped by autoworkers, Black Southerners who had migrated north, and immigrants cooking for their customers. Chung’s sat in this notoriously segregated city, but inside, Chin said, “Black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Jewish, at the restaurant, everyone came.” His grandmother also made corned beef for Irish customers. Michigan hunters brought deer meat down from Up North, and Chung’s would cook with it.
But with respect to Chin’s grandmother, almond boneless chicken’s story is not so simple. Ohio has versions called war su gai and wor sue gai and makes its own claims to the dish. Another possible ancestor is almond pressed duck, an older Cantonese American dish. So maybe ABC is fried chicken and gravy. Maybe it is almond pressed duck after a Midwestern focus group. Or maybe Grandma Chin invented it.
Lisa Yee-Litzenberg, a career coach and a member of the Detroit Chinatown Vision Committee, says that her father, Henry Yee, certainly never made such a claim.
Still, as the “unofficial mayor of Chinatown,” Henry Yee has a major place in almond boneless chicken’s history. He owned Forbidden City in Detroit’s second Chinatown; Yee-Litzenberg started working there when she was 5 years old. Detroit’s original Chinatown had been displaced by urban renewal and a new freeway exit. In an unusual move, the city created a second Chinatown across town.
For the young Yee-Litzenberg, “working” meant playtime inside Forbidden City’s massive interior, which included a tiki bar, three separate dining rooms, and a water fountain. Yee-Litzenberg remembers running around the space with her siblings and other Chinatown restaurant workers’ kids, making soy-sauce “potions” in ashtrays while her father calculated how much money they were costing him.
She also remembers the restaurant making staggering amounts of almond boneless chicken. She recalls 5-gallon buckets filled with fluorescent yellow gravy, possibly her father’s take on “Tahitian chicken” (a sweet and tangy dish usually made with tropical fruits served over rice), she said.
Whatever the inspiration, she remembers the kitchen making the popular dish in bulk. The batter, she recalls (albeit shakily), was a blend of flour, baking soda, egg, and water and was mixed in large containers. Huge chicken breasts were cut to size, dipped, fried in a giant wok, and laid out on sheet pans stacked eight high on rolling carts. There was no sacred written family recipe. Her father cooked by feel.
Yee never talked about its origins. Moreover, his almond boneless chicken broke several rules: a garnish of fresh peanuts instead of almonds, green onions on top, rice as a bed instead of lettuce. The gravy’s fluorescent yellow was possibly made so with food coloring, Yee-Litzenberg said.
It turns out that ABC may be one of those dishes that don’t have a single, clear origin story. Or even a rigid recipe. After recently sampling several versions, I can attest that the slabs-of-chicken look is similar across the board, but that is it. I had it at upscale Chinese spots across the Metro Detroit area, but the best I tasted was at a tiny walk-up suburban takeout-only spot on Mack Avenue in Grosse Pointe Woods (shout-out to Wan Kow Chop Suey!).
Helen Kwong, a researcher now living in New York City, wrote about the dish for Hour Detroit. She grew up in a Chinese restaurant family in the suburbs, and her aunt showed her how their gravy was made. She said it was chicken stock, MSG, and dark soy sauce. Kwong calls that recipe “a copy of a copy of a copy of almond boneless chicken.”
I like that—it does seem as if everyone has their own “copy,” with their own memories and meanings attached. Maybe that’s why ABC could never really leave Detroit. Yee-Litzenberg sees the origins of her almond boneless chicken as her father’s take on Tahitian chicken. Chin sees it as his grandmother’s connection to Detroiters. And Kwong saw it as her childhood comfort food.
“It’s such a Chinese dish,” she told me, before reconsidering. “Well, it’s an American dish. Made in a Chinese restaurant.”
For the restaurant kids who hold this dish in their DNA, it is home. For me, it was a bridge to something outside my world.
I started my almond boneless chicken quest by asking who invented it and why it didn’t move out of Detroit, the way our pizza, which we just call “square pizza” but is now known as “Detroit-style” since New York City discovered it, did. I still don’t have all the answers. But I do think I understand a little better why such a beige dish is so enduring and so locked in a place like the moat that Michigan is—all lakes, no escape. I also thought I preferred the brown gravy to the yellow. But Wan Kow, you proved me wrong.