Seriously, not trying to be racist here but I have never seen a non-Asian working at a Chinese food place (or Japanese for that matter). Is there a hiring freeze on people of other races or do people of other races just not apply? I mean you go to a pasta place and not everyone’s Italian. What gives?
Well, I’ve been a non-Asian working at a Chinese place, so it does happen. So maybe it’s just selection bias? Also, “Asian” is a much more broadly defined group than “Italian”.
Is this something you’ve only noticed at Chinese restaurants? Allowing for the generalization, I think you’ll find that any place that focuses on a specific ethnicity’s food is going to mostly have people of that ethnicity working in the front.
The overwhelming majority of Asian restaurants are family-owned. Therefore, they will likely hire family and friends before some random round-eye off the streets. There is also the whole “dining experience” to consider. I personally wouldn’t eat at a Chinese place where the waiters and cook staff are Anglos.
Most Chinese restaurants are family-owned and operated. At least around here they are.
I believe it goes further than that most of the time. The people that work in a typical restaurant aren’t just all Asian, they are often related as well. I haven’t quite figured out how the system works but I will cite the fact that there are Chinese restaurants run by Asians even in small towns where there is no other Asian population to speak of. Even Mayberry had one on the Andy Griffith show so the idea goes back a long time.
Where I live (Alabama) they’re Asian owned/operated but generally have a lot of Hispanic help in the kitchen and sometimes the serving staff. And ALWAYS Hispanic customers: even the 'less cheap" ones have Spanish speaking customers everytime I go there. I joked on Cinco de Mayo that I was going to a Chinese buffet to celebrate the day with real Mexicans. (At least on sitcoms there seems to be a cliche about Jews loving Chinese food, but I swear Hispanics have them beat.)
This. At a local Chinese place, the father, mother, two sisters and a brother all work at the restaurant and the kids go to school when they’re not.
And then the other two Chinese restaurants are owned by a separate set of competing brothers.
Incestuously delicious, really.
Also, I’m not usually one to defend cultural reappropriation, but the best damned sushi I ever had was made and served by a white guy in his 30s who daylighted as a wrestler and believed sushi was meant to be breaded and deep-fried. Not exactly authentic, I suppose, but I’d choose god damned good over authentic any day 
And also, if you look at the chains - P.F. Chang, Panda Express, Pick Up Stix, etc., they’re a lot less skewed racially (but probably more by class).
My wife’s father owned several Chinese restaurants over the course of his working life. At times he owned three restaurants at the same time, other times only one. He’s now retired.
As others have said, he mostly hired other family members as workers. My own wife worked there after school for many years.
No cite handy, but many hire from agencies in NYC that employ Chinese nationals who travel from city to city and restaurant to restaurant. In my old neighborhood, there was a nice home that where about 20 Chinese restaurant workers stayed at any given time. Supposedly the pay is higher in remote or rural areas where few want to work, far removed from even the smallest Chinese-American community.
My understanding was that Jewish people would go out for Chinese on Christmas, because the Chinese place would be open and not crowded.
On a similar note, why is the Japanese restaurant down the street owned and run by Koreans?
There’s lots of Korean-owned sushi joints in LA.
As an aside, if your business is small enough you are exempt from certain hiring laws. This is why a Chinese restaurant can hire only Chinese staff. If they got big enough the place would be subject to hiring law and couldn’t discriminate.
As others noted, a lot of small businesses are heavily dependent of family labor, without it they couldn’t make a go of it.
About half the Chinese restaurants around here have Hispanic cooks. The other half are staffed only be extended family.
Here Short Order Cook Question - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board is a recent thread which includes a hefty digression about the ethnicity of workers in ethnic cuisine restaurants.
Gee, I don’t seem to recall many “Asians” in the Italian/German/Greek/Etc. restaurants I’ve been to over the years. Why is that?
Presumably, a Korean family decided to start up a restaurant, but weren’t sure how well Korean food would go over, so they instead specialized in the cuisine of another nearby country they were familiar with and which had already been established in the US.
You will notice more ethnicities at national chain like Panda Express.
That’s not the case at PF Chang’s where I used to work. I heard a comedian say it was the best Chinese food ever cooked by Mexicans and served by white people.
That describes the Chinese/Japanese/Thai places in Salt Lake to a T.