P.F. Chang’s Is Like Taco Bell For Chinese People

It’s well worth the visit, at least once

Photo by Yassine Khalfalli on Unsplash

I have never been inside a P.F. Chang’s. I lived near one where I grew up and I’m Chinese-American.

This weekend, that changed.

Over the weekend, my fianceé and I wanted to go to the Cheesecake Factory. We got there around 7 p.m. on a Saturday, and I don’t know what the Cheesecake Factory is like at 7 p.m. on a Saturday for you, but it required a 30-minute wait. Neither of us wanted to wait that long, so we both decided to eat at the P.F. Chang’s next door instead.

The interior of the P.F. Chang’s we went to looked very, well, Chinese (for lack of a better term). There was Chinese wallpaper and Chinese decor. The food was very Americanized and my fianceé told me most people go to P.F. Chang’s not for the food, but the experience.

My dish was decent. But it was nothing special — I tried some special P.F. Chang’s chicken, and it wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t great either. It was sweeter than the authentic Chinese food I grew up with, and honestly, I preferred my local takeout place’s General Tso’s Chicken to the food at P.F. Chang’s.

As a chain, it is everywhere. And I went down the rabbit hole of researching P.F. Chang’s on Google, and found a funny joke about the…