The Pekin Noodle Parlor:

A Century in a Salmon-Toned Corridor

Perched on the second floor of a brick building on South Main Street in Uptown Butte, the Pekin Noodle Parlor reads like an argument against forgetting: a narrow, lantern-lit hallway, seventeen curtained booths, beadboard painted a peculiar salmon orange, and a neon “Chop Suey” sign that has seen more winters than many towns. For more than a century this family-run restaurant has been both refuge and stage — a place where miners, merchants, theatergoers, and later generations of Montanans have ordered the familiar choreography of chow mein, wet noodles (yaka mein), and communal laughter. Its endurance is not merely culinary; it is a living archive of migration, exclusion, adaptation, and quiet persistence in the American West. ([Pekin Noodle Parlor][1])

Origins: Chinatown, Copper, and the “Chop Suey Loophole”

The origins of the Pekin Noodle Parlor are inseparable from the larger tale of Chinese migration to Montana. Placer gold and copper booms of the late nineteenth century drew men from Guangdong and other provinces to the American West; they arrived as laborers, entrepreneurs, and intermediaries in the flows of goods and people that built the region’s towns. In Butte the Chinese community established a dense “China Alley” in Uptown, containing laundries, mercantiles, herbal shops, and restaurants. Anti-Chinese sentiment — sometimes codified into law and often enforced through boycott and violence — pushed many out of industrial work and into small business, where an immigration “loophole” for merchants allowed some families to remain and build enterprises such as noodle parlors. It was in this matrix that Hum Yow and Tam Kwong Yee opened the Pekin — first on West Mercury Street and then in 1911 in its present Main Street location — a venture that married adaptability to a market hungry for novelty and comfort. ([Historic Montana][2])

Architecture and Atmosphere: The Booths as Memory

The building that houses the Pekin was completed in 1909 and the restaurant moved into its second-floor space in 1911. The interior’s defining feature is its segmented, curtained booths: privacy curtains and beadboard partitions that create seventeen almost cell-like dining rooms arrayed along a central hall. These booths recall a range of lost geographies — the semi-private tea houses of Canton, the compartmentalized intimacy of vaudeville theaters, and the discrete dining customs shaped by a minority community navigating majority spaces. Patrons climb a narrow stair, step into a corridor punctuated by Chinese lanterns, and are invited to close a curtain on the street’s noise — an enactment of otherness turned hospitable. Many of the tables and chairs date from the 1910s, while decorative accretions (the neon sign, the salmon repainting) layer newer aesthetics atop older bones. The design is not merely quaint; it functions as a built memory, a tactile archive of how Chinese American provisioners fashioned both visibility and retreat. ([Pekin Noodle Parlor][1])

Foodways and the Making of Chinese-American Cuisine

The Pekin’s menu exemplifies a broader culinary phenomenon: the birth of a Chinese-American repertory that catered to American palates while preserving techniques and flavors that sustained diasporic identities. Chop suey, chow mein, egg foo young, and wet noodles became lingua franca across the West — dishes that performed cultural translation. The Pekin’s famed wet noodles (often called yaka mein) and its curry and house sauces became local signatures, the recipes kept within families and passed down through apprenticeships rather than written books. These dishes, while framed as novelty in early twentieth-century advertising, matured into comfort foods whose meanings accumulated in booths and at counter tables over decades. They are culinary palimpsests: ingredients and methods overlaid with local tastes, seasonal constraints, and the slow craft of generational cooking. ([Smithsonian Magazine][3])

Family, Ownership, and the Arc of Continuity

The story of the Pekin is, at root, a family saga. The Tam family — kin networks reaching back to Guangzhou — played a continuous role in the Parlor’s life. Hum Yow and Tam Kwong Yee began the enterprise; subsequent generations maintained it, including Ding Kuen Tam (known locally as Danny Wong), who came to the United States as a teenager and purchased the business mid-century. Danny Wong and his wife, Sharon Chu, ran the restaurant for decades, folding civic engagement and hospitality into small-business life; after Wong’s death in 2020 the mantle passed to Jerry Tam, a descendant who continues to steward the place. That multigenerational continuity is remarkable in American business history, where family enterprises often fracture under economic, legal, or social pressure. The Pekin’s succession narratives—immigration, purchase from relatives, passing across generations—are themselves testimony to forms of resilience: legal navigation, community rootedness, and a stubborn devotion to a very particular way of feeding people. ([Legacy][4])

Conflict, Erasure, and Survival

Butte’s Chinatown did not escape the rancors of its era. Labor disputes, racialized legislation, and boycotts diminished the size and influence of Chinese communities across the West; by 1940 only a fraction of the original Chinese inhabitants remained in Butte. The Pekin survived not because the town was uniformly welcoming but because family networks, adaptable business models, and a clientele that included miners, theater patrons, and later tourists sustained demand. The restaurant’s endurance must therefore be read against the twin logics of erasure and adaptation: while many Chinese residents were driven from mines or marginalized in social life, entrepreneurs converted constraints into niches — teahouses, laundry services, herbal shops, restaurants — that could persist even amid hostility. The building itself, and the neighboring Mai Wah and Wah Chong Tai structures, are among the last physical witnesses to a once-vibrant China Alley. ([Historic Montana][2])

Memory, Museums, and Public Recognition

In recent decades the Pekin has moved from local institution to national curiosity. Exhibits, oral histories, and news features have turned the restaurant into an emblem of Chinese-American longevity in unexpected geography. The Butte-Silver Bow Archives curated centennial material in 2011; journalists and cultural critics have profiled the Parlor’s peculiar charms; and in 2023 the James Beard Foundation honored the Pekin Noodle Parlor as an America’s Classics winner, a recognition that placed the little salmon corridor in a larger narrative of national culinary heritage. Such honors complicate the paradox of recognition: the restaurant has always been recognized locally as a social anchor, but formal accolades tie it to national conversations about authenticity, preservation, and the politics of culinary value. Those conversations ask what it means for a place born of marginalization to become heritage. ([James Beard Foundation][5])

The Poetics of Place: Why the Pekin Matters

To sit in one of the Pekin’s curtained booths is to enter a compressed geography where time thickens. Conversations arrive muffled from neighboring booths; carts carry steaming plates on metal wheels; lantern light makes the beadboard glow like a memory refracted through amber. The restaurant’s smallness is not merely physical; it is ethical and social: the Parlor insists on close quarters and shared experience in a culture that increasingly privileges speed and anonymity. Its salmon panels and chipped tables are artifacts of ordinary worship — the worship of routine, family, and the many ways humans commit to sustaining each other through food. In that sense, the Pekin is not only a restaurant but also a repository of intangible cultural practice: menus as manuscripts of migration, booths as stages of intimacy, recipes as transmitted knowledge. ([Pekin Noodle Parlor][1])

Conclusion: Preservation as Practice

The Pekin Noodle Parlor’s survival into the twenty-first century asks historians to consider preservation not only as saving bricks and neon but also as sustaining practices and relationships. Its neon sign, its booths, its recipes, and its family stories compose an ensemble that resists simple museumification even as institutions and awards make heritage of it. The Parlor’s future, like its past, will be written in small acts: an apprenticeship beside a wok, a day when a curtain is drawn, a recipe kept intact, and the next generation’s willingness to continue. If historical preservation teaches anything, it is that living places require living caretakers — people who will enter those salmon halls and keep plates moving along the carts, voices low behind curtains, lanterns humming like distant stars. ([Pekin Noodle Parlor][1])

Selected Sources

1. Pekin Cafe and Lounge Inc., “Our Story,” Pekin Noodle Parlor, accessed November 16, 2025, [https://pekinnoodleparlor.com/story](https://pekinnoodleparlor.com/story). ([Pekin Noodle Parlor][1])

2. Adrienne Bays, “The Oldest Continuously Operated Chinese Restaurant in America,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 2023, [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/history-first-chinese-restaurant-in-america-180980552/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/history-first-chinese-restaurant-in-america-180980552/). ([Smithsonian Magazine][3])

3. John Hooks and Austin Amestoy, “What is the story behind the century-old Pekin Noodle Parlor in Butte, MT?,” Montana Public Radio, May 11, 2023, [https://www.mtpr.org/montana-news/2023-05-11/pekin-noodle-parlor-butte](https://www.mtpr.org/montana-news/2023-05-11/pekin-noodle-parlor-butte). ([MTPR][6])

4. “Pekin Noodle Parlor,” Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, exhibit page, accessed November 16, 2025, [https://buttearchives.org/visit-the-archives/exhibits/past-exhibits/pekin/](https://buttearchives.org/visit-the-archives/exhibits/past-exhibits/pekin/).

5. James Beard Foundation, “The 2023 James Beard Award Winners,” James Beard Stories, 2023, [https://www.jamesbeard.org/stories/the-2023-james-beard-award-winners](https://www.jamesbeard.org/stories/the-2023-james-beard-award-winners). ([James Beard Foundation][5])

6. KXLF News, John Emeigh, “Butte’s Pekin Noodle Parlor owner remembered for hospitality and friendliness,” December 1, 2020, [https://www.kxlf.com/news/local-news/buttes-pekin-noodle-parlor-owner-dies](https://www.kxlf.com/news/local-news/buttes-pekin-noodle-parlor-owner-dies). ([KXLF News][7])

7. National Park Service / HistoricMT, “Pekin Noodle Parlor (built 1909),” Historic Montana (Story of Butte), accessed November 16, 2025, [https://historicmt.org/items/show/1981](https://historicmt.org/items/show/1981). ([Historic Montana][2])

8. “Pekin Noodle Parlor,” Atlas Obscura, March 20, 2019, [https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pekin-noodle-parlor](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pekin-noodle-parlor). ([Atlas Obscura][8])