“They want to celebrate the Thanksgiving tradition, yet they can’t accept the American turkey,” Eric Cheung said.

American turkey can also be hard to cook well. Prone to bland, dry breast meat and blackened wing tips, the bulky bird is a challenge for home cooks all over. This is particularly true when turkey is not part of your cultural culinary tradition.

Justine Lee, who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s in the Bay Area with parents who had immigrated from Taiwan, said her mother tried one year to make turkey using American cookbooks. It was, Ms. Lee said, a complete pain.

“She was worrying about the turkey so much she didn’t have time to think about too many other things,” Ms. Lee said. “I remember it was fine, but at the end of the day my mom was like, ‘I just don’t think this was worth the effort.’” Since then, the family has bought its Thanksgiving turkey from Marina Food, a small grocery chain in California .

While many Chinese-American households choose not to bother with turkey, in some cases it can’t be avoided. About 30 years ago, Chinese-Americans in Chicago started going to Sun Wah BBQ with raw turkeys they had received from their employers as Thanksgiving gifts. Many were totally unaccustomed to using their ovens , let alone for such a large bird, so they asked the restaurant for help. (Ovens are not a typical feature of home kitchens in China, and most Chinese home cooking occurs on the stovetop.)

“Asians in general don’t really know how to cook turkey,” said Kelly Cheng, whose family owns Sun Wah. “That’s just not something we generally eat.”

But at Sun Wah, the professional kitchen and ovens were there. The poultry-roasting wisdom was there. All that had to be swapped in was the type of bird. That, said Ms. Cheng, is what got the restaurant roasting turkeys.