A Pasadena dining room, a mall invitation and a family business.

Panda Express grew out of a sit-down restaurant. The Orange County Business Journal, profiling the family in July 2024, said Andrew Cherng and his father, Master Chef Ming-Tsai Cherng, opened the first Panda Inn in Pasadena, California, in 1973. English Wikipedia adds that business was slow at first, to the point that Andrew Cherng offered special deals and free dishes to bring diners in. Andrew and Peggy Cherng had met as students at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, Wikipedia says, and Peggy joined her husband in the restaurant business in 1982.

The fast-food version came through a customer. Wikipedia says that while running Panda Inn, Andrew Cherng came to know Terry Donahue, then head football coach at UCLA, and his brother Dan, who worked in real estate. Donahue Schriber Real Estate managed the Glendale Galleria, and in 1983 it invited the Cherngs to develop a quick-service version of Panda Inn for the mall’s food court. Panda Express opened there in October 1983. The Orange County Business Journal, in its July 2026 profile of the couple, also dates the opening of the Glendale Galleria restaurant to 1983 and describes Andrew and Peggy Cherng as the co-founders and co-owners of Panda Express.

The early chain was a mall business. Wikipedia says a second restaurant opened at the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles in 1985, and that for years Panda Express was found only in the food courts of large shopping malls. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Cherngs experimented with branches inside supermarkets through an arrangement with Vons, and then with stand-alone restaurants. A stand-alone restaurant with a drive-through opened in Hesperia, California, in 1997, Wikipedia says, and from 2005 the chain opened units in college campus food courts, some of them part of residential student meal plans.

Peggy Cherng’s background shaped the operation. Wikipedia says she had worked for several years as a software designer and engineer for defence contractors, including McDonnell Douglas, and that Panda Express computerised its operations early on as a result. The Orange County Business Journal wrote in 2026 that she used her engineering background to develop the restaurants’ operating systems so that guests would get a consistent and speedy experience.

Panda Restaurant Group, Rosemead and a family-owned chain.

Panda Express is one brand within Panda Restaurant Group, which also runs Panda Inn and the teppanyaki and sushi concept Hibachi-San. The Orange County Business Journal dated the first Hibachi-San to 1992, in Bloomington, Minnesota, and said the group’s headquarters and other operational facilities are in Rosemead, in the San Gabriel Valley. The same publication described Panda as a family-owned business in 2024 and reported in 2026 that Andrew and Peggy Cherng continue to co-manage Panda Restaurant Group. The Cherng family has owned the business since it opened its first restaurant in 1973.

The family has added its own outlets for new ideas. Wikipedia says the Cherngs opened Panda Innovation Kitchen in Pasadena with their daughter, Andrea Cherng, to try new flavours and menu items, alongside a tea bar serving drinks such as boba milk tea. The company’s charitable arm, Panda Cares, was launched in 1999, according to both Wikipedia and the Orange County Business Journal, and Wikipedia says donation boxes were installed in the restaurants in 2010.

Abroad, the chain has often worked with partners. Wikipedia lists a restaurant in Mexico City in September 2011, a joint venture with Seoul-based SF Innovation Co. that opened in South Korea in September 2014, and a Dubai restaurant in November 2014 operated, like the chain’s Saudi Arabian restaurants, by Gourmet Gulf. In Japan, after an earlier franchise agreement lapsed, Panda Express returned in November 2016 with a restaurant in Kawasaki run in partnership with Ippudo. A joint venture with Jollibee Foods Corporation, announced in September 2018, brought the chain to the Philippines, where it opened at SM Megamall in Mandaluyong in December 2019. In August 2022 a site opened in the Kaiserslautern Military Community Center food court at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

The logo has also been copied. Wikipedia, citing the South China Morning Post, says a restaurant in Kunming, in southwestern China, using the same Panda Express logo was reported for trademark infringement and closed during an investigation in October 2020.

Design and documentation.

A sit-down or entertainment restaurant brand is carried less by one product than by a whole room. Its name appears first on a roadside sign, a roof line or a canopy over the door, then again on the menu, the server’s apron, the glassware and the receipt. Each of those surfaces asks something different of a logo: a pole sign has to work from a moving car at night, a laminated menu has to hold a long list of item names in a readable order, and a mark printed on a cup or a game card has to survive being very small.

The interior is part of the identity too. Booths, counters, buffet sneeze guards, carpet patterns, lighting and the colour of the walls all set a register before anyone reads a word, and a chain that renovates its dining rooms is changing its brand as surely as one that redraws its logo. Arcades and bars inside a restaurant add screens, prize counters and their own signage to that mix.

Each guide that follows records who founded the brand, who has owned it since, and how its name, sign and rooms have been documented over time, separating independent reporting from what the company says about itself.

Lanterns, a moon gate and a black-and-white building.

The restaurant-design magazine rd+d, reporting on 5 June 2023 on a new prototype, said the building used the brand’s signature palette of black and white, with red accents. The prototype opened in Dripping Springs, Texas, and was developed with the experience agency ChangeUp. Its exterior has a sweeping roofline with warm wood tones, and pictograms along the drive-thru lane tell a Chinese American story.

Inside, the design looked to a festival. rd+d said the concept, called “Celebration Story,” drew on the Lunar New Year and was meant to pay homage to Chinese heritage “in a bold and fun way.” Its elements included terrazzo tables that stand for Chinese New Year confetti, traditional fretwork tiling, red lanterns, an entrance inspired by a moon gate, a signature neon welcome sign and a custom hero mural telling a story of heritage and celebration. A panda sculpture at the Dripping Springs restaurant carried custom artwork by the local Asian American artist Steffi Lynn, reflecting the landscape around Austin, and the magazine said Panda Express intended to work with other local artists in the communities where it opens restaurants.

ChangeUp’s own account of the project, posted in June 2023, describes Panda Express as a family-owned business that wanted each restaurant design to translate Chinese culture for the modern American guest. The agency says the work also added a more dedicated area for online pick-up and a double drive-thru, and that each concept was designed to be easily retrofitted to existing restaurants. In its own news post the agency wrote that the classic black-and-white palette with red accents would remain familiar to fans.

The advertising has made a related argument. The Omaha agency Bailey Lauerman, in a case study on its website, says it worked on a positioning for Panda Express built around the line “Chinese Inspired. American Crafted.”, presenting the chain as an American Chinese brand started by a Chinese immigrant family, with in-store signage, videos, packaging and a Chinese New Year campaign.

For a design guide, Panda Express shows how a restaurant can keep a strict black-and-white base with red accents while its buildings borrow lanterns, fretwork and a moon gate to tell the family’s story. Compare it with Chick-fil-A, another family-owned American chain, and Chipotle, a counter-service chain with its own building language. For this guide we use ink black, porcelain white and lantern red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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