Your review didn’t entice me to buy the book, but I got it as a gift so I can make some comments 
I’ve skimmed a few chapters and read the chapter on the Mandarin in full. @VikingKaj is right to bring up the absence of BBQ— even in the intro, which discusses whether America has any regional cuisines in the age of industrialized food, it bizarrely makes no mention of BBQ.
I get the impression that the book includes some restaurants as change makers, and other restaurants as examples to illustrate broader culinary or cultural shifts in the US. The Mandarin chapter is the token chapter on non-European cuisine and starts/ends with a history of Chinese food in America, and sandwiches in the Mandarin as “an important example of the trend away from chop suey toward a more sophisticated understanding of Chinese food.”
It discusses the Mandarin/Cecilia Chiang as challenging stereotypes and being groundbreaking for several reasons. To enumerate a few, it covers Chiang (1) becoming a successful owner of a fine dining restaurant, and the difficulty of doing so as a Chinese woman, (2) marketing refined Chinese dishes that cost $$$, (3) showcasing Chinese cuisine in a place with non-stereotypical decor and with a wine/cocktail list, (4) introducing non-Cantonese dishes like hot & sour soup, (5) popularizing some dishes in the US (szechuan prawns and deep fried bananas). (6) teaching people like Julia Child, James Beard, and Alice Waters, and (7) mentioning how her son’s PF Changs has 200 international locations (wow, there’s lots in the US).
These are all good things to mention about the Mandarin/Chiang, but Chiang’s story is covered in her autobiography and the history of Chinese American cuisine is covered in various places. The biggest limit of the chapter is it fails to emphasize how these important breakthroughs connect to what happened afterwards. In other words, It would be a more interesting chapter if it followed the title of the book rather than simply contrasting the Mandarin to the status quo for Chinese restaurants in the 1960s. The reader is left with unanswered questions such as: Did Chiang’s success motivate other Chinese restauranteurs to open non-Cantonese restaurants and make it easier to get investors? Or inspire women chefs/owners of all ethnicities? What happened to the former chefs and bartenders at the Mandarin? It’s cool to hear that Julia Child, Alice Waters, and James Beard learned from Chiang and that John Lennon ate at the Mandarin, but how did those experiences or lessons affect those people and others? The Mandarin might have been the first to serve certain dishes, but can their popularity be attributed to the Mandarin or to the new wave of Chinese immigrants in the late 60s? What would America as a whole have not learned, or learned later, had the restaurant not taken off? Is Chiang’s son really the only contemporary person in the food industry than can attribute their career to their association with the Mandarin (as a disservice to Chiang, no one else is mentioned or quoted)?
Freedman’s lack of curiosity could have saved the chapter from ending in a thud that thwarts the title of the book and suggests that the Mandarin did not “change America.” After discussing the closing of the Mandarin, the chapter finishes with a section titled, “Chinese Food in America Today,” stating that Chinese restaurants outside of immigrant enclaves “have not been able to achieve significant innovations or improvements over the last decades.” The reasons for this are complex and touched on by Freedman but he misses an opportunity to reiterate what innovations the Mandarin made and how they permeated the US during its heyday or beyond. Instead we are left with the thought that “American consumers typically resist the notion of a first-class Chinese establishment in terms of both food and atmosphere. In its prime, however, the Mandarin was something of an exception.”
