Order cashew chicken in San Francisco and you’ll get stir-fried strips with vegetables and a light sauce. Order it in Springfield, Missouri, and you’ll get golden-fried chicken nuggets buried under thick brown oyster-flavored gravy, scattered with cashews and chopped green onion, and probably served alongside fried rice that comes from a different culinary universe. The dish is its own thing, invented in 1963, and it almost never travels beyond a roughly hundred-mile radius of where it was born.
David Leong and the 1963 invention
David Leong arrived in the United States from Guangdong in 1940, served in World War II, and settled in Springfield, where he found that local diners would not eat traditional Cantonese stir-fries. Customers wanted something familiar — fried chicken — and Leong reverse-engineered a hybrid: chicken pieces battered and deep-fried in the Southern style, then napped with a soy-and-oyster-sauce-based brown gravy and finished with cashews. He served it first at Lyle’s, then at his own restaurant, Leong’s Tea House, which opened in 1963. The dish caught on immediately with locals who had been suspicious of Chinese food, and within a decade it had been copied by virtually every Chinese restaurant in town.
Why it stayed local
Springfield-style cashew chicken became regional ubiquity rather than national export for a few interlocking reasons. The dish requires deep-frying batter-coated chicken to order, which is a labor-intensive process that doesn’t scale well to chains or to the standard Chinese-American buffet model. The gravy involves oyster sauce, soy, sugar, and cornstarch in proportions that drift restaurant to restaurant, with no canonical recipe. And the dish’s identity is tightly bound to Springfield’s local pride; food writers including Calvin Trillin and Jane and Michael Stern have written about the city’s collective ownership of the dish. There was never a marketing push, and the few attempts to franchise the concept outside the region — including some by Leong’s own family — never gained traction. Chinese-American cuisine elsewhere had already calcified around General Tso’s and orange chicken before Springfield’s version had a chance.
The economic and cultural footprint
By a 2014 estimate from the Springfield News-Leader, more than 70 restaurants in the Springfield metro served some version of cashew chicken, with the dish accounting for a significant share of overall Chinese restaurant sales in the area. Leong’s Asian Diner, run by David’s son Wing Yee Leong, continues to operate as the lineage restaurant. David Leong himself died in 2020 at 99, having received recognition from the Missouri House of Representatives and the James Beard Foundation’s broader regional documentation projects. The dish is now part of the official heritage tourism pitch for southwest Missouri.
Bottom line
Springfield cashew chicken is a textbook case of a regional dish that solved a specific local problem — convincing skeptical Midwestern diners to try Chinese food in 1963 — and never needed to leave. If you find yourself in southwest Missouri, it’s the local order. Anywhere else, asking for it will get you a confused waiter and a different dish entirely.
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