Peter Chang Cafe — Restaurant in Short Pump

I would give it 2.5 stars if I could. Peter Chang's has equal good qualities and equal bad qualities. Let's start with the good:

The Golden Mountain Chicken and Beef are undeniably delicious. We always order Golden Mountain Chicken and another dish when we go out, as if the other dish is bad, the GMC ensures that we leave full of delicious food. The staff are typically a little nice, but we have had one bad waiter before, but it was one time. The portions are for 2 people, and paired with fried rice their food is very good.

The bad:

Their tea-smoked duck is the most disgusting thing I've ever tried. Dry and didn't even taste like tea. Also, they have a serious fraud problem. They have dishes with flounder in them such as the Cilantro flounder rolls. However, they were busted for actually substituting flounder with the Vietnamese factory-farmed Swai fish. Swai sells for $2/lbs while flounder typically sells for around $6/lbs. They were charging us $6 for the cilantro rolls that had a junky, nasty, flavorless, and polluted fish filled with pesticides and antibiotics instead of flounder. We were paying $6 for rolls that promised flounder but had that nasty fish in it. The rolls should've been around $3.50 if they recognized the swai in them, but they didn't. Once they were caught, they simply marked out the all the words "Flounder" in their menus with marker.

They didn't change the price after they were caught. They still serve swai. DO NOT ORDER ANYTHING WITH FISH HERE, IT IS OVERPRICED FOR THE POOR QUALITY OF FISH. Research swai fish and you'll find out how nasty it is. Just order some Golden Mountain Chicken and it'll be good. Additionally, their quality of food is sometimes good and sometimes bad, it's a gamble when we go here, but it's the only Chinese...

This restaurant has a variety of entrees to choose one. My favorite appetizer was the scallion bubble waffle. It’s cute and fun to tear apart, although I think the sauce it comes with is bland. Most foods we got was a hit except a couple. We got the crispy pork belly appetizer, but it wasn’t crispy at all. It felt like it was just breaded and put in sauce, and the pork itself was very chewy. The Peter Chang’s seafood in stone pot with yellow curry sauce was very flavorful and I loved it with the rice and scallion pancake. The tofu and mixed vegetables in stone pot had good flavor and had a good thick sauce using oyster sauce as its base. Although we asked for the beef Szechuan stir fried hot pot to be mild, it was very spicy and didn’t have a good sauce to tie it all together. The basil chicken was wrapped in aluminum foil to keep it hot (good thinking), but I wish the chicken and veggies were cooked more to get a nice sear. As for the bamboo fish, it was excellent and had some flavor and kick to it. I also liked the beef mushroom crispy noodles but wish the veggies and beef were more coated in the sauce. It kind of just pooled at the bottom and already made the noodles very saucy and not crispy. Usual Chinese crispy noodles have a deep fried noodle base which makes it crunchy and then have a thick gravy on top that you can then mix in if you want to. Therefore, out of the dishes we got, I’d only really recommend the scallion bubble pancake, bamboo fish, Peter chang’s seafood in stone pot (yellow curry sauce), and dry fried green beans (but that’s because I like...

From time to time, we’ll either eat at or pickup food from Peter Chang’s. Tonight I picked up and when I got home and took the items out, I was a bit confused about the packaging. We had ordered 2 dishes: a spicy beef noodle soup and a braised fish in spicy Szechuan chili oil. The fish dish came in the bowl container and the beef soup was in the quart (pic), which is normally packaged the other way around. Nevertheless, we opened everything up and no noodles were to be found. We called the store to let them know we did not get noodles with our beef noodle soup. After waiting for the host to get back to us (assuming she spoke to the manager about what to do), she said we could either drive back for just the noodles or be given $5 store credit to cover the charge of the noodles. I was not going to waste my time driving back to the restaurant just for a single order of noodles, nor did I feel a $5 store credit was just in a situation where we could not eat the dish without noodles (it’s a beef NOODLE soup). I then spoke to the manager, Rain, who was firm on the 2 options presented ($5 credit or come back for the noodles). To which I said, I need to be compensated for the whole dish ($15) and not just the component they left out. He couldn’t give me a reason as to why they wouldn’t comp the dish, but kept restating “sorry we can not”…I understand things happen and there will be mishaps, but this was an example of terrible customer service and not making right of a situation that was completely the...