Other times it’s simply Chinese food with American preparations. It’s frustrating sometimes the restaurant’s preparations are so excitingly different that it makes me a little giddy when I first open that takeout container and view my spoils. The restaurant sells whole duck, chicken and fish preparations for a surprisingly small amount of money, and if you want something more challenging, it also offers pork trotters, squid, and shark’s fin soup. There are other delights to be found on the menu, too, such as the barbecue pork buns, the sesame balls and the roast duck. At Dragon Express, the fat is not only rendered beautifully, but the top layer of meat also is broiled to be so crunchy as to have the texture of hard candy. Heat has to be applied in such a way that the alternating layers of fat render properly while the meat cooks to the crispness that makes bacon so satisfying. It’s tragically underutilized in Wichita, though it’s a fickle thing to execute well. Pork belly is what bacon would eat if it could. But the true star of that dish, as it was in every dish in which it was featured, was the pork belly. The sweet and sour fish was just the opposite: the tender and lightly fried pieces of fish were suffocated by a sickly sweet sauce that was clearly more influenced by American palates.Įven in a dish with a name like “braised pork with pickled veg,” the promised veg was hardly to be found, though it did seem to add a little bit of acidity to the sauce. In the “braised mushrooms with bok choy and tofu,” the undercooked cruciferous vegetables created a thin and watery sauce. “Pork with dried tofu” sounds more interesting than the bright red char siu it turned out to be. Their Cantonese heritage is strongly communicated through their food, though with more than 75 items on the Chinese menu and even more on the American Chinese menu, their enthusiasm is met with the limitations of the kitchen.Įven on the Chinese menu, some dishes heavily rely on that protein-vegetable-sauce stereotype. There are several secret Chinese menus in town, and Dragon Express has offered one for the 15 years that Jan and Mon Wong have owned the place. While Chinese immigrants were finding success with these simplified dishes, they still had a desire to serve the food of their homeland to their fellow expatriates, and thus the secret menu was born.
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