How Bourbon Chicken Became The Mall Food Court Staple We Know And Love

The food court is the heart (or at the very least, the stomach) of any good shopping mall. You can get buttery Auntie Anne's pretzels, crispy corn dogs (from Wienerschnitzel or Hot Dog on a Stick, if not the nearly-vanished Corn Dog 7), and, of course, sweet and savory Chinese food — like the bourbon chicken you get in Styrofoam containers or skewered on sampling toothpicks. But where it did come from exactly? No one really knows for sure, but some people say it came from, of all places, New Orleans.

It may not surprise you to know that something called bourbon chicken isn't exactly an authentic Chinese recipe — it has that in common with Panda Express' dark-meat orange chicken, among many other takeout staples — but it's still a surprise to hear it might come from the Big Easy. The story goes that it originated from the famous Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, where a chef at a Chinese restaurant found a way to combine umami-heavy Asian flavors with the garlic and pepper of Cajun cuisine. Despite its name, one ingredient you won't find in most recipes is actual bourbon. Although there are some recipes floating around online that call for it, the kind you buy from the mall food court almost certainly doesn't. (Not unless it's a really fancy mall food court, anyway.)

On paper, the story sounds plausible. There was, in fact, a sizable Chinese-American population in New Orleans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom operated restaurants on Bourbon Street. And if it's not named after Bourbon Street and it doesn't contain bourbon, then we're kind of out of ideas for why it's called "bourbon chicken" in the first place. 

But it's worth noting that, despite the claim that it was a creation of a specific chef for a specific restaurant, nobody has ever come up with a name for either. That story about George Crum inventing potato chips out of spite may have been bogus, but at least we know he was a real chef who served potato chips at his restaurant. Maybe it was a recipe so widely adopted by the Chinese community in New Orleans that it's impossible to pinpoint a single inventor; maybe it was never invented in New Orleans at all and only got its name because some food court guy thought it had a nice ring to it. Regardless, we're glad bourbon chicken came into existence (the mystery of who created it aside).