Beloved northwestern Chinese restaurant Xi’an Famous Foods announced on its Instagram page on Friday, April 1 that it would be opening its first location outside of New York City. Any post on April 1 should always be taken with a grain of salt, but when What Now Philadelphia contacted CEO Jason Wang for a comment, he clarified that the post was “was done in the spirit of April Fool’s, but at the same time, it’s not fully untrue.”
Wang further elaborated that he has been visiting Philadelphia for the last couple of months almost weekly and that he believes that Philadelphia is highly likely to be the site of Xi’an Famous Foods’ first regional expansion. He doesn’t have a specific timeline, but just the possibility that Xi’an hopes to open a location in Philly has caused a major wave of excitement among food lovers on the internet.
Xi’an Famous Foods was founded in the Chinatown area of Flushing, Queens as a stall in the Golden Shopping Mall by Jason Wang’s father David in 2005. David Wang, homesick for his birthplace, wanted to share northwestern China’s “fragrantly spicy” and “spicy and sour” flavors and “hometown food” with his fellow homesick Chinese immigrants.
In northwestern Chinese cuisine, there is a mixture of Chinese and Middle Eastern influences with noodle dishes and bread instead of rice that uses spices such as cumin, chili and Sichuan peppercorns. The restaurant’s specialties are hand ripped biang biang noodle dishes, signature Liang Pi “Cold-Skin Noodles” and “burgers” with house made flatbread stuffed with stewed pork or spicy cumin lamb. Xi’an Famous Foods was the first restaurant to bring the northwestern Chinese cuisine style of the city of Xi’an from Shaanxi Province to the United States.
