In New York, it is believed that the cooking style arrived in the city with Taishanese immigrants, who were some of the first Chinese arrivals here.

Following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, this dish became a favorite of New Yorker who flocked to Chinatown to see and feast on "exotic Chinese culture." It is first mentioned locally by a Chinese-American journalist in the mid-1880s in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Early Chinese restaurants created chop suey with an ingredient mix including chicken livers and gizzards, pig tripe, mushrooms, and bean sprouts, items they would have used in China. But chop suey had no hard and fast rules. A 1903 New York Times article reported, "The fact is that no two cooks make it exactly like. Everything seems to depend on the mushrooms and the mysterious black or brown sauce that is poured over the stew..."

By the early 20th century, Chinese food was becoming trendy, even outside of Chinatown. The first non-Chinatown Chinese restaurant was said to have opened in 1903 at Third Avenue and Rivington Street by a Chinese man named Boston. Boston was the name of Lee Quong June (or Li Quen Chong), a thoroughly Americanized, wealthy Chinese American merchant, and a leader of the famous the merchants association, On Leong Tong. Soon chop suey restaurants popped up all over the city, catering to non-Chinese populations. (Chinese immigrants were said to have disliked the dish, unsurprisingly). This second-floor chop suey shop was captured in 1914 in Chelsea.

Here is another second-floor chop suey shop in Jamaica, Queens, photographed in 1923.

As the dish became more mainstream, its flavors dulled. It was made more approachable to conservative (i.e. American) tastes, replacing gizzards and liver with more common meats and boiling much of the mixed vegetables into a thick gravy. Notice the large signage for the chop suey shop at left. These restaurants, which often occupied second-floor spaces, advertised with large facade signs and electric and later neon lights to stand out among the cacophony of commercial advertisements.

This neon-signed chop suey restaurant in Brooklyn Heights was photographed in 1962. While specifically named 'chop suey' restaurants dwindled in the second half of the 20th century, the proliferation of Chinese American restaurants did not. In 1959 New York City had more than 750 Chinese eateries.

The Chinese food craze (especially for chop suey and chow mein) was so intense in the 20th century that Luchow's, a famous old German restaurant on 14th Street, often was mistaken for a Chinese eatery (owing to the 'chow' in its name). A New York Times article celebrating Luchow's 70th anniversary in 1952 noted that "\[For staff] one problem remained insoluble— what to do about patrons who come in because they think the name is Chinese and are crestfallen when they can't get chow mein or chop suey."