Pekin Cafe

Pekin Noodle Parlor (built 1909) is the oldest recognized continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the United States, positioned in Butte, Montana. The eating place turned into founded in its contemporary vicinity in 1911 by means of Hum Yow and Tam Kwong Yee. Along with the Wah Chong Tai Company mercantile construction (1891) and the Mai Wah Noodle Parlor (1909), the Pekin Noodle Parlor represents one of the last surviving homes from the unique Chinatown community inside the Butte–Anaconda Historic District.

Placer gold mining in the late 19th century brought Chinese immigrants to Butte to work the mines. However, anti-Chinese sentiment stoked by means of labor unions later forced the Chinese out of the mining enterprise. They in the end settled in Uptown Butte in the 1880s and opened agencies in a Chinatown neighborhood bordered via West Galena Street in the North, South Main Street in the East, West Mercury Street within the South, and Colorado Street in the West. “China Alley” became a thriving network that can also have reached a population of 600 at its height.

After labor unions organized a sustained campaign of main boycotts of Butte’s Chinatown lasting many years within the late Eighteen Nineties, and in spite of lawyer Wilbur F. Sanders efficaciously protecting the Chinese people of Butte in Hum Fay, et al. V. 1st earl Baldwin of Bewdley, additionally referred to as the Chinese Boycott Case, most of the people of Chinese people left Butte. By 1940, the most effective 92 remained.