8332 Southwest Freeway, 77074.
So… it was Mother’s Day and I made a reservation at Peking Cuisine for lunch. No, you don’t really need a reservation to eat there, any day, but you do need a reservation for Peking duck. I’ll get to the duck later, there was a good crowd already feasting inside that day… so that’s a good sign.
The menu items here are authentic items, many of which might scare your average American. The first appetizer dish is of sichuan origin and called ‘Couple’s Slice of Lung’ or fuqi feipian. I didn’t know until today that it consists of beef tongue! I knew that it had beef stomach and I am okay with eating that… but tongue? Well, it was good… so I can’t say much about tongue. The texture is slightly softer than regular beef and I think it had some tendons in there somewhere. Even with the discovery, I think I will continue to eat tongue… but it wasn’t as spicy as it looks.
The legendary pig ears! Now, this restaurant did it a lot differently… usually its just an orange pile of mess, but this restaurant arranged the ears nicely, compacted it all together quite beautifully. At first, I was skeptical, because I don’t usually eat pig ears like this (I’m used to this). But this new way of eating it is even better! You can really get a feel for the gelatin complexity in between the crunch. It might sound a little unorthodox, but such is food, and you just can’t knock it until you try it.
This is a particular type of cold noodle dish, very refreshing on a hot summer’s day. The noodles are very thick and reminds me of jello, but al dente. It has a pull to it when you chew. The sauce is a soy sauce garlic, very heavy on the garlic. Good dish overall, but I think I’ve had better elsewhere.
Stir fry bean sprout leaves, its just that simple. I love simple, clean Chinese stir fried vegetables, Chinese people tend to eat a lot of leafy greens and that was what I had growing up.
This dish was just wrong. It came out brown when I was expecting clear sauce. It was sweet when I didn’t expect it. The rice cracker was the only thing good in this dish… oh and straw mushrooms! It was suppose to be shrimp over sizzling rice, where the rice starts to sizzle when the hot shrimp mixture gets poured over it.
This dish was ordered wrong in some sense too. We thought we ordered crispy pork intestines but instead got stir fried pork large intestine with green peppers. Sadness was me, until I tasted it. I have some strange acquired taste for intestine… and I loved this newly discovered dish! I usually eat intestines fried, or if its not fried, then spicy… this was none of the mentioned, but still dang good!
This is one of the few restaurants in Houston that does Peking duck, it is eaten 2 ways or a 2 course duck meal. The first to come is the roast duck neatly sliced. One duck fed 7 people, that’s because we ordered a whole bunch of other stuff too. How to eat Peking duck? Take a piece of meat and a piece of crispy skin and place over tortilla. The Chinese tortilla is a lot thinner than your Mexican tortilla, but not as thin as Vietnamese rice paper. Put sweet duck or really hoisin sauce over the duck meat and skin. Garnish with green onion strips, wrap, and eat! The duck was alright, it was good, but didn’t put me in a food daze. Something satisfying if you are craving Peking duck.
The second course is the duck soup. Duck bones are cooked for hours to make soup. I love duck soup. It has a nice rich flavor to it. Inside this soup, they added cabbage, clear vermicelli, and tofu. It compliments the heavy, greased roast duck because of it’s light, crisp taste. Something soothing after the duck.
So… overall, I was a teeny weeny bit disappointed. I was hoping for a wow factor that I just didn’t get. I remembered the food being better, but that was a long time ago and I might have upgraded my tastes since then. The best dish of the night was the pig ears, followed by the pork intestines. The service was horrible, and we waited at least 45 minutes. Those I kind of just disregard in a traditional Chinese restaurant… because if I factored those in, you would lose the experience of tasting some really authentic dishes!
