California restaurants still serve an 'import' actually invented in San Francisco

The California Bakery Wars

Fortune cookies emerged in California sometime between 1907 and 1914, but three separate claimants fought over the origin story for decades. Makoto Hagiwara, who designed the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, served crescent-shaped cookies with thank-you notes tucked inside to visitors around 1914, and his family maintained he invented them. David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles, insisted he created fortune cookies in 1918 and handed them to poor people on the streets. Meanwhile, Seiichi Kito of Fugetsu-do in Los Angeles also laid claim to the invention in roughly the same era. In 1983, a mock trial at San Francisco's Court of Historical Review ruled in favor of Hagiwara, though the judge was from San Francisco and the decision carried a home-town whiff. What all three stories share: Japanese-American bakers, California locations, and the 1910s—not a single Chinese chef in the bunch.

The cookies actually descend from Japanese crackers called tsujiura senbei, which date back centuries in Kyoto. These were larger, darker, made with sesame and miso, and contained fortunes tucked into the bend rather than baked inside. Japanese immigrants brought the concept to California, where it morphed: American tastes demanded vanilla and butter, creating the lighter, sweeter cookie we know. Photographs from 1920s San Francisco show Japanese bakers—not Chinese—hand-folding the cookies while still hot off flat grills. The fortunes started as thank-you messages or Confucian aphorisms but quickly adopted the vague, optimistic tone Americans expected. By the 1930s fortune cookies had become a minor fixture in California's Japanese restaurants and tea gardens, a charming novelty that bridged cultures without claiming deep authenticity.

How Chinese Restaurants Took Over

World War II abruptly transferred fortune cookies from Japanese to Chinese hands. After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 forced over 110,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps, including nearly every West Coast baker who had been making fortune cookies. Japanese-owned businesses were shuttered or sold at frantic discounts. Chinese-owned bakeries and restaurants, facing no such persecution, stepped into the vacuum and began producing the cookies themselves to meet ongoing demand. By 1945, fortune cookies had been rebranded in the public mind as Chinese, a culinary sleight of hand made possible by wartime xenophobia and the fact that most white Americans could not distinguish Japanese from Chinese culture in the first place. When Japanese Americans returned from the camps after 1945, the cookie's identity had permanently shifted.

Chinese restaurants embraced fortune cookies enthusiastically, and the timing was perfect. Post-war America saw an explosion of suburban Chinese restaurants catering to white middle-class diners who wanted exotic novelty without actual challenge. Fortune cookies delivered: a sweet ending, a parlor-game fortune, and zero cultural homework required. By 1960, an estimated 250 million fortune cookies were being produced annually in the United States, nearly all distributed through Chinese restaurants. Shuck Yee, a San Francisco entrepreneur, mechanized production in the 1960s, making mass distribution economically viable and cementing the cookie's place on every check tray from coast to coast.

The Billion-Dollar Fortune Industry

Today fortune cookies constitute a $150 million annual industry, with roughly three billion cookies baked each year in the United States. Wonton Food Company in Queens, New York, manufactures about half of all fortune cookies sold nationwide, producing four million daily from a single factory. Competitors like Baily International in San Francisco and Peking Noodle in Los Angeles handle the West Coast market. The fortunes themselves have spawned cottage industries: freelance writers earn modest fees composing the banal prophecies, while specialty orders allow marriage proposals, corporate branding, and even ransom notes in noir-themed dinner parties.

Mechanization revolutionized production but the basic process remains unchanged. Batter drops onto hot molds, bakes for roughly 30 seconds, then machines fold the circles around paper slips before they cool and harden. Quality control workers remove malformed cookies at speeds exceeding 200 units per minute. The fortunes, printed on tissue-thin paper in massive rolls, range from pseudo-Confucian wisdom to lottery numbers, which have occasionally caused chaos—in 2005, 110 Powerball players won second-tier prizes using numbers from a single fortune cookie batch, prompting fraud investigations that ultimately confirmed sheer coincidence.

Going Global and Coming Home

Ironically, fortune cookies barely exist in China itself. When American Chinese restaurant chains like Panda Express expanded into China in the 2000s, Chinese customers rejected fortune cookies as baffling and too sweet, viewing them as distinctly foreign. Japanese tourists to America, however, recognize the cookies' ancestry and often photograph them as curiosities, aware of the historical irony. In Japan, tsujiura senbei remain available at Shinto shrines in Kyoto, preserving the original tradition largely forgotten in the country where fortune cookies became famous.

The cookie's confused identity persists in modern pop culture. Films and television routinely use fortune cookies as shorthand for Chinese cuisine, while academic papers cite them as textbook examples of invented tradition and immigrant adaptation. In 2022, California's legislature considered designating the fortune cookie the official state snack, a proposal that stalled but highlighted the cookie's place in regional mythology. Fortune cookies endure not despite their fake Chinese authenticity but because of it—an American invention that revealed more about American desires than Asian culture, now too embedded in the national imagination to dislodge or correct.