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| - My indo-Chinese friend and I came here after our parents heard about this "upscale Chinese chain" bringing good Chinese food with good ambiance to the masses, and they kept bugging us to tell them about it.
We ordered the lettuce wraps, dan-dan mien, and roasted duck.
Two things stood out.
When the waiter brought out our appetizer, he asked us if we liked our food mild or spicy. We said spicy, thinking that he was referring to our dan-dan mien. Before we could react, he mixed the appetizer's sauce with mustard and some other crap. Both of us sat there dumbfounded that he had ruined what looked like a perfectly good sauce.
The duck also left us speechless. When we ordered it, the waiter warned us that duck could be an oily dish. We said that's fine by us (while snickering inside as we wondered what could be better than duck fat). What we got was the most amazingly fat-free duck. It's amazing cause the bird has ALOT of fat. Of course the lack of duck fat (or as Alton Brown calls it, "liquid love") meant that it was the worst, most tasteless and dry duck we'd ever had. It really took some hard work to make duck taste bad. You could leave duck unseasoned, overcook it til it's dry and tough; but give us some some salt and the rendered duck fat to drizzle on top and we'd still say it tastes good.
Needless to say, we didn't say nice things about PF Chang's to our parents.
Despite how shockingly bad the duck was, I'll give 2 stars since the dan-dan noodles and lettuce wraps were average, and it's clean (a trait that's not to be overlooked in a Chinese place, or a place that poses as a Chinese place).
As a sidenote, I feel a little sorry for the waiter. He looked awkward while explaining to us how Chinese eat their meals "family style." Then again, we weren't sure whether we should feel insulted or amused.
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