The Origin of String Cheese

Yeah, it really is kind of shocking how bad American string cheese is. It's kind of an extruded cheese stick, with very little stringiness.

Armenian-style string cheese, on the other hand, is rather salty with a wonderfully dense braid, and the black caraway seeds add to the taste. The only downside for me is that it tends to spoil faster than I can eat it.

The article is talking about a specific "string" cheese packaged in individual serving sizes (frequently seen in children's lunches) and specifically references it being originally based on another stringy cheese (mozzarella) with a much longer history.

Armenian here, yep we were doing it 'just a little bit' earlier ;)

More likely just plain mozzarella. In most restaurants, you're likely getting a factory pre-made frozen and reheated product from a box - certainly that was the case at the chain pizza place I worked at in highschool. "Stuffed crust" pizza was made with string cheese (at least at the time), though. I've seen blocks of mozzarella chopped up at a fair to fry, but no idea whether that's what everyone does. The "stringiness" of melted mozzarella (as on a pizza or in a fried stick) actually mostly depends on the freshness, or so I've been told.

Maybe not in restaurants, but just frying up some string cheese is indeed the easiest way to make your own at home. Tip: freeze them on a cookie sheet after (double-)breading them, that way they won't melt as soon as you throw them in the fryer.