Tucked along East Main Street in Harrisville, Peking Chinese Restaurant serves all the quintessential Chinese-American dishes.
When visiting a new restaurant, I usually start with the most common dish on the menu -- the one every Chinese restaurant should have mastered. Ordering something like General Tso’s Chicken or Sweet and Sour Chicken creates a benchmark for quality; if they can’t get that right, it’s hard to trust how they’ll handle the rest. These familiar favorites are simple in concept but easy to get wrong, making them the perfect test of a kitchen’s consistency, balance of flavor and freshness of ingredients. It’s the culinary equivalent of checking a band’s live sound before diving into the deep cuts.
Naturally, this means I went with my favorites: eggrolls, crab cheese rangoons and General Tso's Chicken (this one indicated it was white meat only). The eggroll was standard, the crab rangoons were creamy enough to earn an above average training, and the General Tso's chicken with white meat was not breaded and fried nuggets like I expected. Rather, it waa velveted - and not too bad.
Velveting is a classic Chinese technique where the meat is briefly marinated in a mixture of egg white, cornstarch and sometimes rice wine or oil. This coating helps seal in moisture and gives the chicken that silky, smooth texture. And, in this case, a better alternative to the sometimes chewy or rubbery texture that can often happen.
Grade: B
