Downtown Troy, Ohio has a top notch selection of restaurants around its central square, an even mix these days; an upscale bar, a nice Italian restaurant, a sandwich shop and a coffee spot. And then there’s Tokyo Peking Chinese Restaurant, a small dive with a small menu with generally inexpensive Chinese food. This is a fast place to dine and the food is pretty simple, but it just didn’t impress me as the kind of place worth a return visit.
The lunch items are all very inexpensive, Tokyo Peking has a number of different options which are mostly classic American Chinese cuisine, and the specials are a very inexpensive way to give a lot of new things a try. Most of the popular ones are more expensive, as are most of the beef and seafood dishes. But I gave a sample to:
- Mongolian Beef: cooked nicely, but the ingredients are pretty basic. The sauce is made with a heavy amount of brown sugar. It’s also heavy on the sodium, which is sort of frustrating.
- Honey chicken: Good with chopped veggies, but the sauce is a little simple.
- Hot & Sour soup: Definitely on the sour side for soup, but this is a good app. The apps come with crispy wonton wrapper, and that adds something nice to the soup.
- Fried rice: is decent, but it’s also a little bland and it could use some vegetables or something else.
- There’s sort of a similar problem with the other side dishes. Take the crab Rangoon, for example; it’s great fried, but there isn’t a lot of filling in the wonton wrapper. It’s got some cream cheese a few other things. Not much though.
- Same for the wonton soup; the ap portion is a single wonton, mostly the wrapper with a small amount of filling, served in what is an almost completely plain chicken broth. Nothing worth a second sample.
There does seem to be a returning audience for the food, and indeed it seems to have a convenience factor that brought in plenty of people when I was there, but I don’t know what I really found it that special.
The atmosphere of the place is basic, it’s a small restaurant with some booths and basic tables. The service is decent, the people are nice enough but they seemed slow to refill water or get the bills. When it comes down to it, there’s just nothing about the place I really cared for. The ingredients really failed to come together in any kind of a spectacular way. It’s convenient for downtown Troy, but otherwise just not a place I can recommend.
Another Food Critic 