Walk into a Chinese restaurant anywhere in the United States and you’ll get a fortune cookie with your bill. Walk into a restaurant in China and you’ll get strange looks if you ask for one. Fortune cookies are an American invention that just happens to be served at Chinese restaurants in the West.
Most historians trace the cookie back to Japanese bakers in California in the early 1900s. Japanese tea shops in places like San Francisco served a folded cracker called tsujiura senbei, which sometimes hid a paper fortune inside. After World War II, Chinese restaurants in America picked up the idea and made it their own.
Today about 3 billion fortune cookies are baked each year, almost all of them in the United States. A few years ago, a company even tried to introduce them to China as an “American novelty.” The Chinese were polite about it, but mostly just confused. Some habits travel one direction only.
