Last night, I spoke to a women’s group at Gleneagles Country Club in Plano. We chatted about restaurants in Dallas and Plano. At the end of the session, I asked them to suggest a Plano restaurant and I would write a review of whatever restaurant they chose. Boy, am I glad I asked.
First off, the dining room at Yao Fuzi is beautiful: it’s a contemporary vibe with stained hard wood floors, white walls adorned with framed Chinese characters, white tablecloths with black napkins, and a single red rose on each table. Our little deuce in the front was separated from the next table by a mini-partition of two frosted glass panels. Our only complaint on the decor is that the wooden chairs are incredibly uncomfortable.
However, I would sit on a bed of nails to eat there again.
If only for the double-cooked pork tossed in a wok with garlic, dried red peppers, scallions, and finished with a dose of sesame oil and a spicy-sweet soy sauce (poorly pictured left). The huge serving of sliced pork mixed with wilted cabbage is surrounded by six steamed wheat buns folded into perfect little pockets to stuff with pork and cabbage. This is the best Chinese dish I have ever tasted in Dallas, and my taste memory only recalls a similar caliber Chinese meal in San Francisco (and I’ve eaten in China).
The menu has items from all over China—Shanghi lobster, pan-fried duck with Mandarin, along with Cantonese and Szechwan specialties. They also what our waiter referred to as “the real deal”: a menu printed in Chinese where you can point and order and see what comes out. (Jellyfish, yum.)
Even though the hot and sour soup was tepid and tired, we didn’t care. A huge bowl is only $3 and it would have been much better if we hadn’t too lazy to send it back to be reheated. We felt our time was better spent savoring the pan-fried rock shrimp pot stickers that were browned just short of crunchy.
My grumpy friend was disappointed in the Five-Star Shrimp (pictured). Although the menu claims the dish is served flambéed with V.S.O.P. Courvoisier, ours was not. The ingredient list reads like Szechwan Shrimp Scampi: “lightly fried shrimp sautéed with fresh garlic, ginger, jalapenos, dried chili peppers, panko, and onions.” Perhaps the panko would have benefited from a dose of cognac—the dish was far too dry and it didn’t seem to pick up any of the flavors of the jalapeno.
No disappointment in the delicate sliced beef with black pepper. The dainty pieces of beef sautéed in slightly sweet sesame oil and finished off with fresh black pepper and chopped scallions melted in our mouths.
Perhaps the top people in the kitchen were off—it was Obama’s night after all and the dining room was deserted. However, I vow to go back with a group of hungry eaters. We left too many good choices untouched.
