Shun Lee Palace
restaurant in New York City, New York
Shun Lee Palace is a Chinese restaurant located at 155 East 55th Street, between Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It claims to be the birthplace of orange beef. It opened in 1971. One year later, Shun Lee Palace's master chef T.T. Wang and partner Michael Tong opened Hunan Restaurant at 845 Second Avenue, the first Hunan restaurant in the country, paving the road for others.
General Tso's chicken, crisp sea bass Hunan style and crisp orange flavored beef are all attributed to chef Wang at Hunan Restaurant.
In a 2003 interview, proprietor Michael Tong estimated that 70% of his clientele is Jewish and that he goes out of his way to accommodate them – including being open on Christmas and catering to kosher customers.
Locations
They have a second location on the Upper West Side, across from Lincoln Center. Shun Lee (opened in 1981) is located at 43 West 65th Street, between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. A smaller and less expensive annex to Shun Lee West is Shun Lee Café, specializing in Dim Sum.
The original Shun Lee Dynasty opened at 900 Second Avenue at 48th Street in 1965.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Shun Lee Palace” as restaurant in New York City, New York. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as restaurant in New York City, New York. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7505014. Authority coordinates are 40.759, -73.969. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 2003, 1981 and 1965.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shun Lee Palace” 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.