Market Plate Fixture · Fried Vermicelli
Samoan-Style Chop Suey
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It shares a name with the Chinese-American takeout dish, but the two barely overlap — Pacific chop suey (sapasui) is built on soy-sauced vermicelli noodles, a recipe traced to Chinese labourers who arrived in Samoa during the German colonial plantation era of the late 1800s.
Cellophane vermicelli noodles are stir-fried with soy sauce, cabbage and often corned beef or chicken into a soft, dark tangle, served as a scoop on a paper plate alongside other Pacific dishes. It's one of the standard plates sold at Ōtara and Avondale markets, usually dished up next to hāngī and doughnuts.
Why it's made this way: The recipe traveled from Chinese communities in Samoa to Auckland's Pacific diaspora and became so thoroughly adopted that most people who grew up eating it consider it a Samoan dish, not a Chinese one.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
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