American fried rice
Thai fried rice dish with "American" side ingredients like fried chicken, ham, hot dogs, raisins, ketchup, and croutons
American fried rice (Thai: ข้าวผัดอเมริกัน, RTGS: khao phat amerikan, pronounced [kʰâ(ː)w pʰàt ʔāmēːrīkān]) is a Thai fried rice dish with "American" side ingredients like fried chicken, ham, sausages, raisins, and ketchup. Other ingredients like pineapples and croutons are optional.
History
The origin of American fried rice has a number of tales, anecdotes, urban legend, and related stories. Most of those stories are related to either American troops or their culture. Currently, there are three major tales and hypotheses about the origins of American fried rice:
Sureepan Maneewat created the dish
Khun Ying Sureepan Maneewat, the wife of Chao Krung newspaper's pioneer editor Vilas Maneewat, claimed to the Sakul Thai magazine that she created American fried rice circa 1950. She was a manager of Ratchathani Restaurant, the restaurant of Don Mueang Airport which cooked meals for several airlines. One day, an airline cancelled a flight, leaving her loads of prepared American breakfast; sunny eggs, sausages and hams. Sureepan decided to cook the American breakfast ingredients with the leftover fried rice, hence the name "American fried rice". The proteins varied day-to-day, depending on which "American breakfast" was left on the day, from sausages and hams to baked chicken.
"Go Jek" created the dish
Some believe that the American fried rice was created by a Thai-Chinese chef, "Go Jek", during the Vietnam War era to serve to United States Marine Corps and United States Air Force personnel stationed in Korat and Udon Thani, Thailand, it was not generally found in Thai restaurants outside Thailand, but with the proliferation of Thai restaurants in the United States, American fried rice is now appearing on Thai restaurant menus there.
“American fried rice” enters the record as thai fried rice dish with "American" side ingredients like fried chicken, ham, hot dogs, raisins, ketchup, and croutons. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what American, fried and rice can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4745482. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “American fried rice” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.