Chang’An is a fine dining Chinese restaurant. To my surprise, they mentioned they had been around for 8 years. I vaguely remember seeing it come up on Opentable on and off, but it never really interested me. I love fine dining, but find it is easy to be disappointed with Chinese fine dining – the “normal” versions are just so hard to beat for the price.
Anyway, someone who was helping me at a store I was shopping at recently mentioned the flaming Peking duck to me so I decided to give it a try. We started with the duck which you need to order a few hours in advance. It is carved table side and the chef will flambe it.
The duck is served with some standard and not so standard sides. The not standard sides include a house made strawberry jam and pear slices. I tried both and prefer the traditional condiments. Like other places, skin is served with brown sugar and meat in crepes.
As a second course, you can order the duck as a won ton soup or fried. We did the soup. It reminded me of tortellini. The soup was savory and a nice addition to the meal.
Next the House Special Chili Crab. The crab and sauce was good, but had an odd addition to it – fries! The server mentioned that Westerners requested it this way. Very unusual.
We also had pan fried chive pork dumplings which reminded me of gyozas in their presentation with the pan fried, oversized skin, which I have only seen in Japanese dumplings. If comparing these to gyozas, I prefer gyozas as they are much tastier though these were ok.
Next, we had pea tips and truffle prawns with house made noodles. When I was in Shanghai, I had an amazing noodle dish with truffle shrimp. This was not on par with that but still pretty good. I could not taste any truffle but the noodles were cooked well, and I liked that they were house made. They were more like a pasta than a Chinese noodle which is not a bad thing.
Lastly, we had the Wagyu fried rice 5A. I do not know if they meant A5, and that the beef came from Japan. The dish itself was good but a bit salty.
Overall, service was good, and the setting was very nice. It is overlooking the water and there is nice outdoor patio seating. This is something you do not see everyday at a Chinese restaurant. However, the food was expensive. I don’t mind paying up if the food matches, but not everything was worth getting. I would probably come back to this place if I was entertaining someone or wanted to show someone a nice Chinese restaurant and if I thought they might be amused by the duck. 7/10