This is part of Breaking Bread, a collection of stories that highlights how bread is made, eaten, and shared around the world. Read more here.
Becky Lin despised cheese when she first moved to the US at age twelve. Having grown up in rural Fuzhou, China, it just wasn’t part of the cuisine. Then again, neither were scallion pancakes—or cong you bing, the allium-flecked, flaky-layered, and golden-griddled Chinese flatbreads that are a mainstay in Chinese restaurants in the States. Since her family moved to New York City, however, Lin quickly fell in love with the bread. (Cheese took a little longer.)
.jpg)
During the pandemic, Lin was making scallion pancakes—now, “one of my go-to comfort foods”—when her four-year-old daughter requested one with cheese on top. Lin had mozzarella in the fridge, so she melted it on the browned top.
“It was like the best of both worlds coming together,” says Lin, “East and West.”
Today, Lin is the chef-owner of Lin & Daughters in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where she serves a “cheesy scallion pancakes” appetizer inspired by her daughter’s creation. Scallion pancakes are folded to enclose a filling of cream cheese and green onion reminiscent of crab rangoon, says Lin, before mozzarella cheese is griddled on top. Crispy and oozing, the appetizer has become a crowd favorite at Lin & Daughters since it opened in late 2022.
This is one of the tamer creations among a broader scallion pancake reimagining. At restaurants, pop-ups, and home kitchens across the US, chefs are rolling the hot cakes into burritos, burgers, breakfast sandwiches, and much more, with ingredients that are near and dear to them, Chinese and otherwise. It’s a reflection of newly acquired diaspora tastes, creativity, and the enduring appeal of a versatile flatbread—but perhaps none of this should be surprising for a dish rooted in travel and evolution.
Scallion pancakes have long been part of the culture in China and Taiwan, where the flatbreads are commonly eaten as a street food snack. Their exact origins, however, are murky. Some have speculated that cong you bin may have been inspired by paratha, the Indian flatbread with a visibly similar construction; chopped scallions, a typical Chinese garnish, were possibly added to the dough along the way. By that theory, a busy international port city like Shanghai may have birthed them. “It’s a water port, so it’s a metropolitan city and a hub where people would pass through,” says Betty Liu, author of My Shanghai: Recipes and Stories from a City on the Water, which, naturally, includes a recipe for scallion pancakes.
Whatever the origins may be, throughout China and Taiwan there are a number of popular riffs on this bread. Vendors fluff up crispy, golden hotcakes with a few deft hacks, slightly breaking up the layers into swirly mass called shou zhua bing (or “hand grab pancake”). In Taiwan, scallion pancakes are commonly rolled up with a fried egg, or braised beef shank, cilantro, and peanuts. It's not too far of a stretch, then, that chefs stateside have taken their experiments further.
Also during the pandemic, Isabel Lee was making scallion pancakes from scratch in her Chinatown, New York City, apartment when she decided to incorporate pork pernil that her partner, Luis Fernandez, brought home from their favorite bodega. Lee grew up in Los Angeles eating fusion food—her mom is Thai and her dad, Chinese—so mixing in food from her partner’s Dominican background made perfect sense. She also slathered guacamole and queso blanco on the pancake, before drizzling it with homemade lemongrass chili crisp. The result was so good, Lee began sharing it with others by lowering the ‘burritos’ in a bucket from her fire escape.
“It started out as a project for friends and family, but very quickly it grew bigger and bigger,” says Lee. Now, Lee and Fernandez operate the pop-up Forsyth Fire Escape out of the food hall Olly Olly in Chelsea, New York, where they serve their signature roll-ups, plus new menu items like the plantain, egg, and cheese scallion pancake breakfast burrito. Lee consulted with her mother to tweak her scallion pancake, and Facetimed with Fernandez’s mom to perfect their pernil. The couple estimate that they now sell hundreds of scallion pancake burritos per day.
“It’s nice to be able to highlight our different cultures through food—everyone that comes in has a conversation and a lot of them have never tried scallion pancakes before so it’s a great way to share our culture,” says Lee.
Lee and Fernandez aren't the first to draw the burrito connection, either. “I always loved the burrito-iness of it,” says Frankie Gaw, author of First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home. Gaw learned to make scallion pancakes in Cincinnati with his grandmother, who had first emigrated from China to Taiwan in the late 1940s, before moving to the States with his family. Growing up, Gaw was taught to roll up scallion pancakes with fried eggs, adding in leftovers like marinated beef tendon and whatever pickled vegetables were on hand.
Gaw now loves to experiment with scallion pancakes from his kitchen in Portland, Oregon, making tacos with fillings like ancho- and coffee-marinated pork carnitas, and almond hoisin sauce.
“I’ve played around with switching out the green onions for basil, or cilantro—treating scallions as an interchangeable herb-y thing,” he says.
Making scallion pancakes at home can be tedious, although they’re faster to produce than many breads in that they’re usually unleavened. And, unlike the American breakfast staple pancake—or pajeon, the savory Korean pancake—they don't start with a wet batter that’s poured onto a pan where it solidifies. Instead, it’s made from a simple wheat flour and water dough that’s kneaded until silky-smooth (as with noodles or dumpling skin). While techniques differ from cook to cook, most hold that the dough is laminated by rolling it out into a flat round, sprinkling it with scallions and oil, then rolling it into a log; next, the log is coiled up like a snake before it is rolled out into a flat round. These disks are then rested (or frozen) before being pan-fried in oil on both sides.
“I think it’s so genius, the layering that happens in the dough,” says Brandon Jew, chef-owner of Mister Jiu’s, the award-winning contemporary Chinese American restaurant in San Francisco. He compared it to folding cold butter into croissant dough to build layers. "It’s just a really smart way of building layers.”
Mister Jiu’s serves a very popular sourdough scallion pancake appetizer on the bar menu: Using a naturally leavened sourdough starter in their dough was initially their nod to one of San Francisco’s signature breads, says Jew. Their sourdough scallion pancakes are served with soubise, crème fraiche, chives, and a dollop of paddlefish caviar on top—playing off of blini, the Russian pancakes.
Another well-established Chinese American restaurateur has been looking to a less likely source of inspiration for scallion pancake creations: McDonald’s. Tim Ma, chef-owner of Washington, D. C. restaurants Lucky Danger and Laoban Dumplings, recently opened the all-day café, Any Day Now, and introduced a scallion pancake burger, with a double patty of ground beef, shredded lettuce, pickles, and American cheese—reminiscent of a Big Mac. (Ma even dressed up as the Hamburglar on its launch day.)
The burger joins a menu of three scallion pancake breakfast sandwiches—with bacon, egg and cheese; kimchi egg and cheese; and sausage egg and cheese—that have been selling like, well, hotcakes. On Any Day Now’s first day, a line wrapped around the restaurant, and the pancakes sold out in two hours.
Ma's team is not the first ones to do scallion pancake breakfast sandwiches, he says—Win Son Bakery in Brooklyn has been serving scallion pancake BECs stuffed with thick-cut bacon, fried eggs and melty Reading Raclette from Spring Brook Farms since 2019, to similarly ecstatic crowds.
Like buns or tortillas, maybe it's all a sign that the versatile bread is a more readily thought-of element in modern American cuisine—even outside of Chinese and Taiwanese food. “People already know and love scallion pancakes,” says Ma. “We just filled them with stuff that’s even more familiar.”