David R. Chan

David R. Chan is a retired tax attorney and accountant who lives in Los Angeles, California. David's grandfather migrated to California in 1880, and as a third generation Chinese American, he ate very little Chinese food while growing up. Once he started working and traveling the United States, however, he developed a hobby of trying the local Chinese cuisine as part of his travel experience, which led to the goal of eating at as many Chinese restaurants as he could, logging his restaurant visits on a computer spreadsheet. David ate in anonymity for decades, but in 2012 food writer Clarissa Wei learned about his Excel document listing the over 6,000 Chinese restaurants he had eaten at (the current count is 7,550), and wrote a feature article which was quickly picked up by Huffington Post, People.com and hundreds of websites around the world. Having written numerous articles in the 1970s and '80s on the history of Chinese in America, he resumed writing 7 years ago about Chinese restaurants in America while weaving in the historical topics he previously wrote about.