For a long time, fast food options in America have been mostly limited to greasy burgers, french fries, more greasy burgers, and tacos. Today, you can get your Americanized Best boxed mashed potatoes food fix at a drive-through window instead of at, you know, a locally-owned American Chinese restaurant. This is great when you don’t want to sift through Yelp reviews or take a chance on the Chinese buffet down the street from your hotel and your options are otherwise limited. At the risk of coming off like vegetable haters, we had to put the super greens at the very bottom of our list.
If you’re trying to eat healthily or you just dislike having to taste anything, Panda’s Super Greens is definitely a good low-calorie, reduced-carb option. Now, if you want to use the Super Greens as a canvas for whatever else you’ve ordered as an entree, then cool. Mixed in with an order of Orange Chicken or Beijing Beef, the Super Greens will add enough bulk to your meal that you might not miss adding brown or white rice to your bowl. But hey, kudos to Panda Express for giving diners a healthy option so we don’t have to experience that “oh no” feeling when someone suggests fast food for lunch. The Honey Sesame Chicken sure sounds like it should be delicious — honey, sesame seeds, string beans and “crisp yellow bell peppers,” or so sayeth the Panda Express menu. But there was nothing crispy in the Honey Sesame Chicken we ate.
The green beans were so withered that they weren’t immediately identifiable as string beans, while the breading was thick, pasty, generally unpleasant, and wrapped around disappointingly small pieces of chicken. There was nothing inherently off about the sauce, which was sweet and mild, but we were pretty disappointed by the lack of the titular sesame seeds. They really should have been front and center in a dish that literally has “sesame” in its name. To be fair, we were surprised that the Kung Pao Chicken was actually reasonably spicy. You probably know that Kung Pao Chicken isn’t a Panda Express exclusive.
This famous staple of American Chinese restaurants is popular because of its spicy kick, which usually comes from the whole red chili peppers that share real estate with fresh vegetables like zucchini and bell peppers. What was surprisingly absent from Panda Express’s version of Kung Pao Chicken was the red chili peppers. We even checked the website to see if maybe the restaurant’s recipe didn’t include them, but there they were in the photograph, just as abundant as the rest of the vegetables. Despite the fact that the string beans in this dish were much less overcooked than the string beans in our Honey Sesame Chicken, we still weren’t able to give this dish a terribly high ranking. The beans had that bright green color you like to see in a well-cooked vegetable, but they weren’t really crisp and neither were the onions. As far as lower-calorie options go, the String Bean Chicken was okay. At 190 calories, you don’t have to worry much about blowing your calorie budget for the day if you indulge in a small order, but Panda Express does have better-tasting low-calorie options available.
We’d pass on this entree even if calorie count was at the high end of our dining concerns. Panda’s Mushroom Chicken basically just tastes like the String Bean Chicken, only with different vegetables. We ranked this one slightly above the String Bean Chicken mostly because of the mushrooms in the mix. It does seem like Panda Express could have done a little more to make this entree stand out compared to the String Bean Chicken, given that they both appear to be made with the same kind of ginger soy sauce.
But alas, there are no cashews or green onions or anything to give your mouth some surprise textures to keep things interesting, so if you’re going to choose the mushroom chicken you might want to pair it with brown rice. We’ve been ranking the vegetarian options kind of low, but it’s not because we’re unrepentant carnivores or we think eggplant can’t ever make a great stand-in for animal protein. It’s because vegetarian food has to be really well thought out to appeal to a wider audience. Sadly, the Eggplant Tofu really just seems like an afterthought, like someone on the Panda Express menu design team went, “Hey, shouldn’t we have something on our menu for those weirdos who don’t like chicken? That said, the Eggplant Tofu isn’t terrible. The sauce is sweet and just spicy enough to be interesting, but the texture of the eggplant leans towards downright unpleasant.
It was mushy and a little bit oversaturated with sauce, while the firm tofu was too bland. Deep-fried cream cheese in wonton wrappers are kind of a staple side dish for any American Chinese restaurant. So, it seems like they shouldn’t really be hard to get right, especially if they’re only one of three different side dishes on your menu. Still, the Cream Cheese Rangoons we got in our order failed in two respects.