When food writer Tina Caputo moved to San Francisco, a city renowned for its Chinatown, a few years ago, she searched far and wide for a beloved Chinese-American dish of her Michigan childhood. The dish, which she ordered countless times growing up at her neighborhood Chinese restaurant, Lotus Pond, involved crispy, deep-fried white-meat chicken, cut carefully into slices and set atop a bed of iceberg lettuce. It was served with a drizzle of savory brown gravy and a scattering of almonds, and she knew it as almond boneless chicken.

Caputo never found a version of almond boneless chicken in SF’s Chinatown that quite resembled what she’d had in Michigan. More popularly, “almond chicken” in America’s wide swath of Chinese-American restaurants would mean a version of cashew chicken, a dish of diced poultry, stir-fried with vegetables and cashews and then topped with toasted almonds; elsewhere, the chicken would be appropriately breaded, fried, and almond-topped, but served without gravy. After time, Caputo and her transplant friends — also from Michigan or elsewhere in the Midwest — would get together and prepare the version they knew for dinner parties. “So many people have this longing for it after they leave the state,” Caputo says. “For a lot of us, it was our first exposure to Chinese food; we grew up eating it and took it for granted.”

Start describing this dish to someone from Michigan and the response will be immediate; present the same scenario in Cleveland or Columbus, Ohio, and the reaction probably won’t be as instantaneous, but frequent takeout orderers will still likely have some familiarity with a similar dish, there known as war su gai (spelling variations include wor sue gai and war shu gai, which roughly translates to “wok-fired chicken”). Search menus across the country for war su gai or any of its spelling variations, and you’ll find even more iterations, particularly in Ohio.

The origin of almond boneless chicken has proven tough to nail down. “Sweet and Sour,” a 2011 exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History chronicled the long history of Chinese food and restaurants in America. Chinese immigrants, mostly from Canton, started arriving in the U.S. in the mid-19th century, but the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration; the early 20th-century emergence of Chinese-run “chow chow” or “chop suey houses” often combined Cantonese culinary traditions with Western flavors. The exhibit featured hundreds of Chinese food menus, but none of them named almond boneless chicken, Caputo says.

Restaurant owners Kenny Yee of Wing’s Restaurant and Steve Yee of Ding Ho Restaurant, both in Columbus, both claim the dish originated in the city: Each had family members who worked at the former Far East Restaurant in Bexley, Ohio, back in the 1920s, where they say war su gai was born.

At Wing’s, which Kenny’s father founded in 1970, star anise is in the broth that makes the gravy, and the topping is peanuts rather than almonds. Ding Ho, which has been open since 1956, has its own particular blend of spices and makes sure to use broth from simmering the chicken in the gravy; there, wor sue gai (as they spell it) outsells everything on the menu at least three to one, according to third-generation owner Steve Yee. Kenny Yee notes that some places in Columbus serve it with a darker gravy with a stronger ginger flavor. “It’s just fried chicken and gravy more than anything else,” he says.

Though the almond boneless chicken may have originated in Ohio, it’s become so beloved in Detroit that some consider it one of the city’s iconic dishes. Margaret Yee, the proprietor of Kim’s Restaurant in Troy, Michigan, has served almond boneless chicken at her restaurant since it opened, and she suggests the recipe dates all the way back to when her grandfather opened the restaurant’s former location in Detroit.

“The way the origin story goes, all the immigrants, when they came here in the early 1900s, they would work together with each other to come up with these recipes for a region,” she says. “Because of limited language skills and resources, they would share with each other even though they were competitors, and develop the recipes together. That’s why the food often would all taste the same [back then].”

But over the years, many of those traditional restaurants closed since second- and third-generation families were less interested in taking over the family business. Kim’s can claim to be one of the few remaining restaurants serving the traditional version of almond boneless chicken. There, the gravy is vegetable-based. “It’s a very simple presentation, but it takes a lot of time to do,” Margaret Yee says. “The batter and the deep-frying of the chicken, that’s where the skill comes in… if you overcook it, it can taste rubbery.”

Peterboro, a contemporary Chinese restaurant in Detroit, was inspired to create its own version when the restaurant opened in spring 2016. Since taking over the kitchen, chef Joe Flores has adjusted the opening version and made it his own, somewhat inspired by his teenage years cooking at P.F. Chang’s, where he prepared a dish called almond cashew chicken (like many versions across the country, it’s a chicken and nut stir fry with veggies — bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, and celery — in a soy-based sauce).

For Peterboro’s version of almond chicken, Flores debones chicken thighs (“dark meat is more forgiving,” he says), and cooks them sous vide. His batter is spiked with vodka — for crunch, he explains, as alcohol evaporates more quickly than water and helps create a crispier crust— and his broth is a mix of rice wine, chicken stock, and dehydrated shiitake mushrooms. He adds a little sugar and yuzu to his gravy for balance and makes his own spice blend involving gochugaru, or Korean red chile flakes. “Customers love it,” he says.

Caputo has seen Detroit’s passion for the dish play out personally. When her story about the dish’s unknown origins appeared on Zester Daily (an online food publication that is now defunct, though the article lives on), it generated a whopping 36 pages of comments.

What makes almond boneless chicken so beloved? Ask any fan and the phrase “comfort food” will likely come up. American Food Roots author Michele Kayal, who also explored the history of the dish, thinks its accessibility to Western palates plays well in the Midwest, where items like gravy and iceberg lettuce feel familiar. “It’s just straight-up, delicious comfort food,” she says. “Fried chicken, gravy. What’s better than that?”

At Kim’s Restaurant in Troy, the dish is also a best-seller. Margaret Yee now even offers a lighter version, in which the chicken is not fried, to appeal to guests looking for less-heavy fare. But ultimately, “It’s just like mashed potatoes and gravy,” she says. “It’s something [people] were brought up with; something they crave.”

Missy Fredrick is Eater’s associate cities editor. Fariha Tayyab is a photographer and writer, currently residing in Columbus, Ohio by way of Houston, Texas.

Editor: Erin DeJesus