Popular P. F. Chang's Menu Items, Ranked Worst To Best

You might know your local P. F. Chang's as the place with the iconic red logo. You might know it as the grandest dining area in town. Or, if you're anything like us, you might just know it as the best night of the week, growing up: Friday or Saturday, when your parents were too tired to cook, and everyone rejoiced in a hearty order of Chinese food.

Those nights were marked by a pile of takeout boxes, trial-and-error with chopsticks, and round-robin fortune cookie reads that may or may not have gotten a little spicy. To this day, not much has changed on a P.F.Chang's night. Boxes of rice still sit in the fridge afterward, leftover sauce packets live in the silverware drawer, and your fortune strip may end up taped on your apartment's refrigerator (or is that just us?) Ordering P. F. Chang's is an experience from start to finish, guided by the pure deliciousness of their American Chinese cuisine. The one consistent truth about indulging in the casual chain? The food is so good that, without fail, you'll eat too much. That's right — fortunes aren't the only end to a P. F. Chang's night. They usually pair with a stomach ache.

Although it's nearly impossible to avoid that fate, we taste-tested the top dishes at P. F. Chang's in hopes that, just maybe, it will help you make a more targeted order, overcome overeating, and circumvent a post-P. F. Chang's stomach ache.

Ah, the Crispy honey chicken. Here's a second dish we were eagerly anticipating: just looking at it evokes strong memories of Chinese food night as kids, back when this was the most adventurous we'd get with our order. But, not unlike the Mongolian beef, this dish fell short of our expectations. 

First of all, when it arrived, every individual chicken bite was stuck together. We get it, it's honey chicken, so it should be sticky. But should it be that glued-together? Probably not. When we slid it out of the takeout container onto the plate, the entire dish moved as one mass. Amusing? Yes. Concerning? Also yes.

We picked apart the mound and grabbed a single piece of chicken, more skeptical by that point than we were when the dish arrived. Stickiness aside, this is appetizing to look at, and the piece of chicken held promise. Unfortunately, upon biting in, it became clear that the ratio's just a little out of whack here. The fried coating makes up about 70% of the bite, which is at least 30% more than it should, even for order-out Chinese food. This might not have been as much of an issue if there weren't a second factor at play: the honey seemingly seeped into the breading, making it more soggy and wilted than anything else. There was definitely no crisp factor, as the name would leave you to believe. 

Ultimately, this dish is better left in your fond childhood memories.  

As a kid, sesame chicken was our favorite. The dish is above-average anywhere you go, but P. F. Chang's does it particularly well, piling on the sesame sauce and coating every slab of chicken in juicy, thick deliciousness. Sesame seeds deck the top of the chicken, stuck on in a way that's less off-putting and more just dynamic, creating a subtle added texture that makes the entire dish stand out. 

The pieces of chicken themselves are a better cut than in P. F. Chang's other chicken staples, i.e. the crispy honey and the Chang's Spicy. Here, they are larger and more rectangular, and every bite is a noticeably better ratio of chicken-to-breading. Instead of feeling like you're eating fried dough with a hint of chicken, when you dig into the sesame chicken you feel like you're getting the real, meaty deal. 

And the chicken isn't even the best part of this delicacy. When it comes down to it, the broccoli steals the show here. Soaked in the same sesame sauce as the chicken — perhaps just by virtue of sitting beneath it in the takeout container — this broccoli has all of the flavor and none of the unhealthiness of the chicken. If we could order sesame broccoli, we would. But until someone decides to actually create that dish, ordering sesame chicken and picking out the broccoli is the next best thing. 

While good, P.F. Chang's sesame chicken offering ultimately doesn't rank higher because it's still just chicken. 

There's nothing like a solid vegetable spring roll at any restaurant, and P. F. Chang's is no exception. On the P. F. Chang's menu, these puppies are described as "crispy rolls stuffed with julienned veggies, [and] sweet chili dipping sauce." We're here to tell you that they just about nailed that wordage. 

The rolls, unlike other misnamed menu items, are actually quite crispy. The wrapping is thin and neatly folded, although one of ours did come slightly misshapen, as you can see. It didn't affect the taste, which, overall, was flavorful and enduring. Of course, the dominating notes were that of the fried wrapper, but the julienned veggies did hold their own, making for a mouth-watering combo. These rolls do have room for improvement, though: the one word that wasn't quite accurate in their description is "stuffed." That adjective conjures images of a roll that's absolutely bursting with vegetables, which simply isn't the case here. Instead, they coat the bottom half of the tube, leaving a lot of space for air in every bite. To amp up their roll game, P. F. Chang's could definitely throw another handful of veggies in there. 

At the end of the day, though, the lack of vegetables isn't a deal-breaker. These rolls have the signature spring roll taste, and honestly, dunking them in the sweet chili sauce results in a pop of flavor that ends up being all you really need to forget about any potential drawbacks of the dish. 

The miso glazed salmon is hard to rank fairly because, in full transparency, we got it delivered. Not that delivery should affect taste to any notable degree, but if it ever were to, it would be in the case of a fresh fish filet. This dish is meant to come flying out of the pan, onto a plate, and maybe even still be a little too hot by the time it gets to you. Instead, our delivery salmon came off the stove, was sealed into a plastic container, traveled 25 blocks downtown, and then up five flights of stairs. A different journey, and one that it's easy to imagine might make anyone a little less flavorful than they usually are. 

The delivery salmon still pulled a fairly high ranking, all things considered. It takes eighth place out of fifteen dishes, which means that with this menu option, we are officially transitioning from dishes we're less crazy for to the top-ranking dishes that we're all about. 

The salmon tasted fresh, if a little dry. The work P. F. Chang's did to char the skin to a buttery crisp was definitely the stand-out factor here, and the spinach, cabbage and garlic-ginger aromatics made for a strong backdrop. Even if you're not big on mushrooms, the Asian mushrooms in this dish are well-cooked and seasoned to a point where they're hardly objectionable. Overall, we'd recommend the salmon. Especially if you live closer to a P.F. Chang's. 

If we were giving superlatives to these rankings, the beef with broccoli would take "Most Unexpected." As rare consumers of red meat due to flavor and texture alone, we did not have high hopes for P. F. Chang's classic main. The beef, by all accounts, shouldn't taste that different than the lowest-ranking Mongolian beef. Both are flank steaks, and although P. F. Chang's menu doesn't specify, it looks like the beef with broccoli is slathered in the same sweet soy glaze as its Mongolian cousin. But for some reason, these beef dishes could not taste more different. Perhaps it was the addition of ginger-garlic aromatics in this one that did the trick, or maybe the green onion. Either way, we couldn't get enough of this meal, which is in reality fairly standard. 

Thinking back to the sesame chicken, for a minute — remember how the broccoli was the main event in that dish? It ends up bearing the same crown here. The steamed broccoli is just as good as it was in the sesame chicken plate, but here, it is doused in even more sauce. We ended up eating more steak than we expected to, but powered straight through all of the broccoli. There's nothing like fresh, steamed veggies smothered in a sweet-tasting soy sauce that retains a slightly beefy flavor. 

While the crispy green beans only come in fourth overall in this rating, which we're basing on a healthy mix of look, taste, and nutritional value, they're absolutely number one when it comes to the most addicting dish you can get at P. F. Chang's. We downed these in about three minutes flat which, as you can imagine, made for a rough rest of the taste test. In true fried food fashion, the crispy green beans are just as incredible going down as they are terrible to digest. 

These fall in the same realm as the Kung Pao Brussels Sprouts: a vegetable that probably has lost most of its healthiness by the time it's served. Even still, it's one that you can still easily convince yourself "isn't that bad." It's a vegetable, after all! It has to be at least a little bit good for you!

Not the way we eat them. These incredible, truly crispy fried wonders are tempura-battered and come with not one but two sides of P. F. Chang's "signature spicy dipping sauce," which tastes like chipotle mayo to us. We found the most delectable way to inhale these was to practically soak them in the sauce before biting — assuming you know the people you're dining with well, double dips should not only be permitted, but encouraged. You know you're doing it right if, like us, you had about a quarter of a plate of green beans left with two scraped-clean sauce containers. 

These wontons were won-derful. Sorry. But it's true — the level of mastery and innovation P. F. Chang's brings to this appetizer is staggering. From the crispy shell that you can tell is freshly baked to the crab filling, which the menu describes as "creamy" (for once, we agree with the menu here), to the bell pepper and green onion additions and the spicy plum sauce; there's nothing not to love about this plate, which is equal parts aesthetically pleasing and tasty.  

The crab wontons dish is yet another instance of P. F. Chang's seafood really shining, as the meat in these delicacies was fresh and perfectly shredded, despite being mixed with cream. The bottom part of the wonton is completely full, skating around qualms we had with other P. F. Chang's dishes, and something about the verbiage "hand-folded" just makes these seem superior. 

If you're going to order one appetizer and one appetizer only for your Chinese food night, we recommend highly considering the hand-folded crab wontons. As number two overall on our list, they're more or less the dish to beat.