In 1983, a judge in San Francisco officially ruled that the fortune cookie—the dessert everyone associates with Chinese restaurants—is Japanese. The case pitted two families against each other, both with bakeries in California, both claiming the invention. Neither was Chinese. Makoto Hagiwara, gardener of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, and Seiichi Kito, founder of Fugetsu-do in Los Angeles, had one thing in common: they'd been serving crisp cookies with messages inside since the early 1900s, long before American Chinese restaurants adopted them.
A Kyoto sweet that crossed the Pacific
The story goes back further. In Kyoto, near Shinto shrines such as Fushimi Inari, families had been selling a cookie called tsujiura senbei or omikuji senbei since the nineteenth century: larger than the American version, made from dark miso batter, folded around a slip of paper with predictions of good or bad fortune. It was cooked by hand over charcoal, one at a time. Japanese immigrants who arrived in California in the late 1800s and early 1900s brought that tradition with them.
Makoto Hagiwara served cookies with messages to visitors at the Japanese tea garden in the 1910s. Seiichi Kito, in Little Tokyo (Los Angeles), baked them in his shop from 1918 or earlier. Both versions were unmistakably Japanese: they were served in Japanese tea rooms, with green tea. The messages were polite, sometimes short poems. The batter was slightly different from today's—more restrained, less sweet—but the gesture was the same: fold the hot cookie around the paper, let it cool and crack it open to read your fortune.
How a Japanese cookie became "Chinese"
The Second World War changed everything. In 1942, the US government interned more than a hundred thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Japanese bakeries closed or were sold. Meanwhile, Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and other cities—many of them run by Cantonese immigrants who'd arrived decades earlier—needed a cheap, light, exotic dessert that would please white customers. The fortune cookie fitted perfectly. It was easy to mass-produce, lasted for weeks, cost pennies and offered a touch of Oriental mystery that diners expected.
By the 1950s, the association was sealed. Americans believed fortune cookies were Chinese. When Chinese restaurants expanded across the country—and later across Europe—the cookie travelled with them. Today, if you order Chinese takeaway in Manchester, Dublin or London, you'll very likely get a fortune cookie in the bag. In mainland China, until recently, nobody had seen them.
How to make fortune cookies: technique and scale
The basic recipe hasn't changed much. Flour, sugar, oil (or butter), egg whites, a little vanilla or almond extract. The batter is spread in thin circles on a hot griddle or baking tray. The trick is timing: you have to fold them while they're hot and pliable—barely seconds after taking them out—and let them harden in the characteristic shape. Too late and they crack; too soon and they stay soft.
Artisan bakeries still fold them by hand, one at a time, as in Kyoto. Industrial factories use machines that stamp, fold and cool thousands an hour. The cost difference is enormous. A hand-folded cookie might cost 20 or 30 pence; an industrial one, less than a penny. For a small restaurant serving a hundred covers a week, buying mass-produced cookies makes far more sense than trying to produce them. But if you're looking for a dessert that tells a story—a detail that sets your menu apart—making a small batch, with personalised messages, can justify the effort.
What a small food business can take from this
First: a dessert doesn't have to be authentic to be useful. The fortune cookie became a success because it solved a practical problem: it was cheap, travelled well, lasted for days and added a touch of theatre at the end of the meal. If you've got a street food stall, a market pitch or a café in a coastal town, think what could fill that role on your menu. It doesn't need a centuries-old tradition; it needs to work.
Second: personalised messages are worth more than the cookie. Some small restaurants in the UK use fortune cookies with phrases tied to local events, birthdays, even promotions ("Come back on Tuesday and your coffee's free"). The added cost is minimal—printing your own messages on paper strips costs pennies—but the memory lasts. If you make the cookies yourself, you can change the messages every week.
Third: telling the real story can be your edge. People love knowing that something so "Chinese" was actually born in California, invented by Japanese bakers. That detail on your menu, on a blackboard or on social media, starts conversations. And conversations bring customers back. If you want to work out the cost of a homemade dessert or understand what price to put on something you make yourself, the food cost formula helps you see the numbers clearly.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the fortune cookie really come from?
From Japan, originally. The tsujiura senbei was sold near Shinto shrines in Kyoto from the nineteenth century. Japanese immigrants brought it to California in the early 1900s, where bakeries such as Fugetsu-do in Los Angeles and the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco served it in tea rooms. After the Second World War, Chinese restaurants adopted it and it became a symbol of Chinese food in the West.
Why aren't they known in China?
Because they were never Chinese. The fortune cookie is a Californian invention, with Japanese roots. In mainland China they weren't part of the culinary tradition; only in recent decades have they begun to appear in some tourist restaurants, imported as a Western curiosity.