Traces how Chinese migrants challenged racialization and disenfranchisement by establishing Chinese restaurants during the Gilded Age. 

In Gastrodiplomacy, Heather Ruth Lee dives deep into not just the history of Chinese restaurants in early twentieth-century New York City but the delicate, inchoate, and constantly evolving dynamics among their owners, workers, and their predominantly white clientele. Lee argues that the stylistic and capitalist choices made by restaurateurs (“gastrodiplomats”) had outsized political effects on paternalistic white diners (“gastroliberals”) who patronized their establishments, particularly when it came to racial relations in cities that were growing and diversifying. Lee is not starry-eyed—satisfying white tongues and stomachs didn’t lead to an urban utopia of peace, harmony, and brotherhood—but she shows the great and subtle influences of Chinese migrants on American urban space, culture, and metropolitan identity in a defining time.

In Lee’s capable and compelling telling, the Chinese restaurant becomes a distinctive locus for the negotiation of political power, cultural influence, urban identity, and more. Gastrodiplomacy reveals much about burgeoning and increasingly cosmopolitan American cities, as well as about their dynamic relationships with the fluidities of the American character.

Heather Ruth Lee is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Introduction
1. The Chinese Banquet: Cultivating Chinese Political Power at the Dinner Table
2. Brawny Appetites: White Masculinity, Dining in Chinatown, and Gastroliberalism
3. Popular Estimation: A New Theory of Exclusion and the Legal Status of Restaurant Owners
4. Making Chinese Restaurants American: Li Hongzhang’s 1896 Visit and a New Gastrodiplomacy
5. An Angry Chinese Lady: Mai Zhu’s Detention and the Public Campaign to Free Her
6. Chop Suey Desire: White Women’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Chinese Restaurants
7. Claiming Treaty Rights: Maximizing the 1915 Restaurant Cases with Chinese Business Practices
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Appendix: Chinese Restaurant Return Dataset
Abbreviations
Notes
Index