Maybe you’ve heard the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none.” That’s always the danger with a restaurant that serves pan-Asian fare. So it is with Pan Asia Cuisine, an emporium that opened at a busy corner of Camp Bowie Boulevard and Bryant Irvin Road. The strip-mall eatery serves Chinese, Japanese, and Thai food, and the restaurant’s huge selection inevitably comes with a certain amount of unevenness. Still, I was able to find some good things.
The interior is large and roomy, with the Asian décor (including a Japanese welcoming cat) limited to the space behind the cash register. The restaurant is fronted by large plate glass windows, which make it a particularly pleasant place to take lunch on a sunny day.
I started with the deep-fried pot stickers, which sat atop a crispy bed of cabbage with a soy dipping sauce on the side. They were good, though nothing you couldn’t match by deep-frying your own. Better was the wonton soup, which featured three enormous, pillowy wontons filled with ground beef, swimming in a bowl of pork broth with scallions and tiny shrimp in the mix. The sumptuous starter had three kinds of meat stuffed into dumplings too huge to take in one bite.
I was looking forward to the traditional ramen, but imagine my disappointment when it turned out not to be ramen at all. Rather than Asian noodles, the kitchen served regular spaghetti that was overcooked by some margin. What a shame, because everything else was done right: the sauced pork, the little pieces of cucumber and fried egg. I can only hope that the restaurant was temporarily short of the real noodles and hastily substituted something else. Either way, it was a serious downer.
Thankfully, that can’t be said for the chicken pad Thai. The dish was made with proper broad rice noodles and served in a red sauce that wasn’t too spicy. Even better were the pan-fried noodles, which were fried to a great crisp and stout enough that they became pleasingly chewy after mixing with the sauce instead of turning limp. The plate was also piled high with vegetables — seven different kinds, by my count — and enough pork to make it a substantial meal, in addition to being the best noodle dish I had on my evening visit.
I found something weird when I ordered the crispy duck. The traditional Chinese dish is served with crepes, cucumber, and spring onions. Pan Asia served me none of these things, placing the duck breast on a bed of iceberg lettuce and serving it with a side of rice. At least the meat also came with a bowl of the customary ginger duck sauce, even if there was way too much of it for the amount of meat on the platter. The bird itself wasn’t done in the Chinese style, with air blown between the meat and the skin creating a crisp, paper-like consistency. Instead, it was coated in a cornmeal batter. The resulting dish bore an uncanny resemblance to oven-fried chicken, and the grainy breading obscured the succulence of the meat. As a duck fan, I found it disappointing.
A small but functioning sushi bar with its own chef is located in the corner of the restaurant. While the place’s sushi won’t strike fear into the hearts of Shinjuku Station’s chefs, it was still tasty and reasonably creative. The Spicy Lyndsey roll, with yellowtail, avocado, cucumber, and masago topped with tuna and salmon, was good, though the finishing touch of a chile mayonnaise drizzled on top was applied a bit too heavily. Even better was the Poison Roll, with tuna, salmon, and cream cheese wrapped in rice paper instead of the usual seaweed.
Officially, the restaurant has no dessert options, but every time I went, Pan Asia had the same special for the day: ice cream fried in tempura batter. (There were never any other specials, either.) The vanilla ice cream had pistachios embedded inside, which added a mildly distinctive spin on a familiar dessert.
With more than 100 different entrées to choose from, you’d do well to ask the waitstaff some questions before deciding what to order. Lucky for them, the restaurant’s location and economical prices make it easy to go back and sample more of the menu.
[box_info]Pan Asia Cuisine
Fried pork dumplings (8) $4.95
Chicken pad Thai $7.50
Spicy Lyndsey roll $11.95
Crispy duck $10.95[/box_info]
