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| - For years I lived a block from this little unsuspecting restaurant, and I always passed it by because I thought it was just another greasy counter serving your average Chinese fare. If you walk into Peking Garden and they hand you that menu with the classic Americanized dishes (General Tso's chicken, lo mien, fried rice, etc.), tell them that you actually want to see the menu with the traditional, true-blue Chinese dishes (squid, sea cucumber, etc.). Unfortunately, I can't vouch for the Americanized food items as I've never tasted them.
However, there IS just one thing that makes this restaurant GOLDEN in my book: Peking Garden is the ONLY Chinese restaurant in the Champaign-Urbana area (to my knowledge) where you can eat a very specific type of traditional Chinese cuisine called hot pot (sometimes called shabu-shabu in Japanese restaurants). If you've never eaten hot pot before, let me explain the general idea: a portable stove and miniature pot of boiling broth will be brought to your table. You will also be given plates of raw vegetables, meat, and noodles. You toss whatever you want to eat into the pot, wait a few minutes, and then start serving the soup from your table. Definitely a treat during winter months, and worth a try for adventurous diners!
I haven't tried too many other dishes here, but I did order dumplings once, and have been requesting them on visits ever since. Usually most Asian restaurants (even the Chinese ones) sell what I consider Japanese or Korean dumplings. The outside dough is paper-thin, indicating that the dumplings were probably bought frozen instead of prepared in-store. At Peking Garden, the dumpling dough is thick and chewy, the way Chinese dumplings are SUPPOSED to be! The meat filling is still a little plain (just ground pork and a few carrots, nothing special), but the dough wrappers are FO' REAL!
The interior decor is that faded '80s look that seems to plague a lot of the restaurants in this area. You can't really tell if the evening mood lighting is actually mood lighting or if they just didn't bother to fix some broken bulbs. I wouldn't recommend this place for a romantic rendezvous, but it could be fun for friends eating in large groups.
Everybody loves Lai Lai or Golden Harbor, and while the menus at those restaurants are a good deal larger, Peking Garden does have its own unique specialty, the hot pot. If you're not sure what to do when you get there, stare at the tables of Chinese diners, follow their lead, and you won't be disappointed!
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