The Side-By-Side Mall Food Court Restaurants Reddit Loves

Long live the mall food court – in our hearts, anyway. The nearly-gone but far-from-forgotten terrain wasn't/isn't just a place to eat and hang out, but a social and cultural phenomenon. This wide array of food franchise vendors dominated suburban American shopping centers. Sprawling communal dining areas peddling quick-service meals and free samples skewered on toothpicks proved to be a foolproof formula from the 1970s through the 1990s. Mall food courts emerged as a staple cinematic fixture of countless teen movies of the era, like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982) and "Valley Girl" (1983), to 1990s films like "Mallrats" (1995) and "SNL" sketches. But, when today's nostalgic foodies fondly look back on mall food courts of yore, it's not the films they remember. It's the Chinese and Cajun franchises, which always seemed to be located side-by-side.

A Reddit thread in r/nostalgia (with more than 2K upvotes) asks, "What are the best classic mall food court restaurants?" The top comment answers, "Some sort of pan-Asian place right next to some kind of Cajun Louisiana style place that inexplicably tasted exactly the same." The thread is filled with enthusiastic agreement: "Yes! Bourbon St chicken somehow tasted exactly like General [Tso]," writes one fan. Another agrees, "Good ol' Cajun Cafe and its Bourbon Chicken...and also Chinese food. It was really cool when the next-door pan-Asian place also started selling bourbon chicken," followed by a concurring mallrat who wrote, "'Bourbon chicken' tastes like that place's 'teriyaki chicken."

Both Chinese and Cajun culinary styles (at least, the takeout stands common to American food courts) commonly feature sticky-sweet, pan-fried chicken with a dimensionally tangy, sweet-savory flavor profile. There's a striking resemblance between classic New Orleans bourbon chicken and General Tso's chicken, named after a Chinese military leader. Both dishes also prominently feature ginger and sesame. Also notably, Chinese counters might have been many Americans' first introductions to Asian culinary flavors (without breaking the bank, or budging too far from the comfort zone) during the O.G. mall food court heyday of the '70s-'90s.

In fact, food historians dispute the origin of NOLA bourbon chicken, positing that the dish stems from an American fusion of Chinese and Cajun culinary influences. Chinese restaurants were constructed across New Orleans during the Reconstruction, as early as the mid-1800s. For a time, Crescent City was even home to its own Chinatown enclave, and in the modern era, Miss Shirley's Chinese Restaurant earned the Best New Restaurant in Louisiana award from Southern Magazine in 2024. 

In the shopping mall scene, this NOLA-meets-the-East duo isn't necessarily a culinary pairing of the past, either. The pairing remains. "My mall [still] has a Chao Cajun and Asian Garden," shares one Reddit comment. Others agree, "Sakkio Japan next to Cajun Grill." Chao Cajun first hit Pennsylvania malls in 1996, and Cleveland's Tower City mall had a Sakkio Japan until 2017. Cajun Cafes can still be found in malls from Massachusetts to Florida.