while red lobster is inferior to regular seafood restaurants, pfchangs is superior to your run of the mill chinese restaurant in both quality of ingredients and preparation. a food snob familiar with pfchangs would not turn their nose up at it in favor of a regular chinese restaurant. soother’s mom and pop chinese restaurant has Kung Pao chicken which is obscured by the veggies, i posted a pic of pf changs which has only chicken and peanuts, scallions and the spicy red peppers. the meat is seared at a very high temp to seal in the moisture and it is rolled in some spicy coating, there is no sauce.
OK, so Chang’s knows how to cook Kung Pao, so does the place I go to here in the middle of nowhere. The question is, can they do Mushu?
The thing to me is that there is a vast difference between a chain, a regular, and a REAL (insert type of cuisine) restaurant. Be it Chinese, Mexican, Indian, or seafood or whathaveyou.
I spent years eating in Chinatown in NY and so I am really snobby about Chinese food. I’m also snobby about Indian food, and have become really so when it comes to Mexican or other Latin American cuisines. I’m really getting into Guatemalan tamales :)
We don’t eat as much oriental food as we used to because I no longer have the sources for ingredients I had in Dover. We eat far more Latina American food because of the easy access to the ingredients. Where you live you can probably pick the cuisine you enjoy and have access to all the ingredients. I make do with what I have available.