Peking Restaurant
Now rare in Orange County: High-quality Chinese-American food, in a Westminster plaza
The 2021 closure of Irvine’s popular Chinese restaurant Sam Woo left a considerable hole in Orange County’s dining scene, simultaneously stripping the city of a top local destination for Cantonese-style sitdown meals, dim sum, and Hong Kong-style barbecue and takeout. Years later, no one restaurant has been able to fill all those gaps, but there are still options in the county – young and old – to cover each of the bases at least partially.
Westminster’s Peking Restaurant is one of the best remaining Americanized Chinese restaurants left in Orange County since Sam Woo’s closure. It’s very old by local standards, having opened around 1982, and while the dining room is nice enough, it doesn’t look like much from the outside even by local standards for “hole in the wall” restaurants. In other words, you probably won’t believe the quality of the food until you taste it.
When you go in, the server – described gently as “persuasive” but alternately as pushy – will almost certainly try to point you to their kuo-tieh pan-fried dumplings, beef with green onion pancake, and xiao long bao soup dumplings. This is understandable: When Peking opened, these items were certainly harder to find than they are today (see: A&J Restaurant, Little Pan, Northern Cafe, Paradise Dynasty), and her recommendation is almost certainly a reflection of comparative pride in the authenticity of these items. They’re just not as necessary to try here as they once were.
Ironically, what Peking Restaurant’s frozen-in-time menu offers is access to decades-old Chinese-American classics that have essentially evaporated from Irvine, such as General Tso’s Chicken, which is done so well here – so crispy, tangy, and sweet – that we felt like we’d been in withdrawal for years after our first few bites; ditto with a spot-on moo shu pork, arriving already wrapped in crepe-like pancakes. We say “ironically” because we typically don’t suggest going into a Chinese place for the Americanized items, but in Orange County, high-quality versions of those items are now rarer than formerly obscure regional Chinese dishes.
Peking Restaurant is also a place for the Chinese soups you may have been missing – sizzling rice with shrimp, wor wonton, or hot and sour – plus two dozen seafood items ranging from honey walnut shrimp to fish with black bean sauce and three-flavored kung pao. You can find here the pan-fried and dry noodles Sam Woo once served with various proteins, and the long lists of beef, poultry, and pork items you’d expect – plus some, as Peking’s pork collection is atypically packed with options from across China.
Our visit to Peking left us filled to the gills and happy to have found someplace to scratch an occasional itch for really good Chinese-American cuisine. We look forward to returning for more.
Stats
Price: $$
Service: Table
Open Since: 1982
Addresses
8566 Westminster Blvd.
Westminster, CA 92683
714.893.3020