Review of P. F. Chang’s in Union Square

My brother and I saw the imperial horse wrapped in its plastic and styrofoam, in the summer of 2021. One can hardly imagine now, how quickly history obliterates itself, the naked fear that leaped into my throat. A Druid in his shattered green pride before the conquering Roman legion: this monumental piece of statuary on 13th Street. It was during that uncertain epidemiological defrost where our public society revealed itself to us again, but brittler, harder—how could I forget the quotidian despotism of my country? And here it was now emboldened into such frank expression that it immediately overcame a year’s lucky amnesia of its brutality. It was a new P. F. Chang’s.

If a lifeform ever replaces us and possesses a stomach able to bear the tragic archelogy of our world passed, they will surely think: here lived their Gods. Or perhaps, one can hope, they will not suffer the same derangement as us: they will not be myopic towards the immortal, who force themselves into history with pyramids and plinths, but understand that what is truly alive in a culture is what passes away. What a horrible paradox that we cannot admire the sane who craft their temples out of wood, rotted tenderly by the sea, dedicated to living gods, rotted too; or whose dance is given only to the air it disturbs, and to each other. How could we exit, then, the suicidal one-upping of a megalomania for permanence, which determines the very limit of the only history we have to inspire us? This is why I am interested in food criticism. 

Chinese food is my favorite food. And if I am called upon by narrative demands to reject the biological determinism of a “palette,” I will tell this story. I went to China the moment I got my subway privileges, earned prematurely by an inability to sit still extrapolated to its extreme of complete bodily mania when confined indoors. I mean Mott Street, which was China until I found the dim and wide spur of East Broadway that is really China; or Flushing, Queens which is China now—as I am unable to escape the severe parochialism of such a metropolitan upbringing.  

So my taste developed parallel to the one cultivated at home, on corned beef and french fries, extrapolated from an inherited shtetl nutritional dogmatism deranged by New World abundance. How lucky was I, in that precarious period of ideological pubescence, where a teenage boy can watch the wrong Youtube video and be botched forever, to have this innocent culinary fascination—which was really for the smell of star anise and soft red light on wandering nights, really for narrow streets apart from the brutal logic of the grid? It was not too alien. I was, of course, familiar with a certain pragmatism of self-cultivation, a rigidity of familial duty, a mandate towards a rectification of names and a philosophical resignation-towards-death, having grown up on the Upper East Side: the literal Orient compared to the West—the side of Manhattan where I suffered my social debutanthood and received my formal education, a free-wheeling bastion of skepticism, rationality and the individual.  

It is clear now how foreigners are always turned into their food, how the movability of another’s feast is enforced with the economic logic of liquidity, even as difference is scrupulously gagged. The closest I’ve ever been to China is Athens, where I accompanied a friend who was making her self-funded Birthright trip to the dusty, bloody homeland of lesbianism. Each rustic taverna, as we descended the hill the Acropolis crowns, bragged with increasing bravado of the authenticity of their cuisine by detailing the pedigree of the grandmother they had millennially imprisoned in the kitchen, who was burdened with the unbroken accumulation of culinary tradition. When we were finally convinced by the most pathetic and brutal pitch, when we were finally convinced by hunger—I wept. I could not help but weep into our steaming Moussaka, which had migrated here from the Levant before it was civilized by béchamel. There is no record of civilization that is not simultaneously a record of barbarism: I understood it then. It was the most authentic cooking I’ve ever had the privilege of eating.

When I was nineteen I was jury foreman of a horrible attempted murder case. Before deliberations, which required our cloistering, where they fed me twenty-eight days of turkey clubs prepared by the Delicatessen of the Supreme Court of New York State; I ate at 456 Shanghai on Mott Street each day of testimony, on my own recognizance. 

The prosecution attempted to discredit the defense’s expert witness, a mortician, by digging up serious posts he had made on his blog as a medical student about how being around corpses in the morgue, on the other side of disgust, made him hungry. He was sad that his earnest observations on physiology were being vulgarized; the judge agreed they were irrelevant. So we were instructed, the jury, to forget everything we had just heard with that special juridical magic that grants people’s peers rationality. 

During lunch, I saw the mortician eating alone in 456 Shanghai. We had the same gratuitous order: eight pork soup dumplings sweating in their bamboo banya, shrimp fried rice, and chicken with cashews. Here was a man afflicted with appetite, pariahed by letting its animal cry ring out in the upright halls of the polis where the red flash of hunger called for desperate suppression in the smooth genteel administration of caging men and women. He had gotten the last two-top in the restaurant and to this day I regret not sitting across from him, not hearing his testimony from the other side.

Instead, I was put at a communal round table where a family who was visiting from Chengdu were seated around me. They made a point, they said, to visit Chinatown whenever they traveled because, as they explained to me (though I admit it took me some time to comprehend), it was impossible to get Chinese food, as such, in China. In fact, it was rare to even be Chinese at all without the special nostalgia of distance, without the provocations made against the imagination by the sheer fact of a wholly unfamiliar street—even without, sadly, some hate. Traveling from the Jewish homeland of New York, I experienced a similar revelation living in Mississippi for half a year. Like a horse released from domesticity, who goes through rapid physiological changes during the process of its feralization, whose brow descends, whose hair coarsens on its hide, whose teeth broaden and flatten: I became Jewish. 

Recently, steeled anew against the dread of empire, my brother and I visited the P. F. Chang’s in Union Square, passing under the statue’s shadow, to eat. It was a lovely red space, decorated with a mural of an armed female samurai. We were seated promptly by the kind hostess beside three identical Buddas. A man was finishing alone at the table next to us and capped his meal with an individually wrapped floss pick he’d brought himself. The menu was expected save for the legally mandated calories, which always induces in me a kind of vertigo as to the purpose of dining. I put these thoughts aside. There was lo mein, kung pao chicken, beef with broccoli: warhorses of this cuisine. Some nods towards modernity: wagyu steak, fire-braised short ribs, dynamite shrimp. We towed the line, ordering sesame chicken, crab fried rice off the verbal special menu—and a dish that fascinated me by its naked puncture of the menu’s suspended disbelief in China: the lettuce wrap, described as “A secret family recipe and our signature dish. Enough said.” It was stir-fried chicken cubes and onions mixed with crispy rice bits served with four titular leaves of green lettuce and a ramekin of seasoned rice vinegar. It was a relic from another era. It would have gone the way of jello pie or bananas and sour cream if not for the pure sentimentality that protected it through the focus groups and the succession of executive chefs beginning from this restaurant’s creation in Scottsdale, Arizona the same year as my birth. This was a truly novel dish to me, made more so by the intricate manual aspect of its consumption my brother and I fumbled through, learning as we ate with the assistance of a waitress alarmed at our original ineptitude, who demonstrated how to properly encase the filling. It was more foreign to me than any zongzi or gong bao. Reader, can you understand my horror and delight? Finding that I could stomach even this? I, for whom Arizona is only hearsay? As I realized this would be the closest I’d ever get to traditional cuisine, indeed to tradition at all, as America eats itself—and time eats time.

7.5/10.

P. F. Chang’s

113 University Pl, New York, NY 10003