Claudia Chiang, a child of the Chinese aristocracy who escaped the Japanese occupancy on China in the mid 1940s, introduced the United States to the authentic cooking style of Mandarin China in her titular San Francisco restaurant in 1961. The success of her restaurant over the next 30 years inspired her son, Peter, to open a restaurant with Peter Fleming to bring a more approachable style of Chinese cooking that paid homage to the type of cooking he grew up with. That restaurant, P.F. Chang's is now a restaurant with many locations and offering a tenuous link to whatever you might consider to be authentic Chinese cuisine. Go to any version of this restaurant in the United States and you're not likely to find many Chinese people eating. It's mostly suburban dwellers of a certain income level that want something only slightly outside of their comfort zone. It's Chinese food in the same way that Abuelo's offers Mexican food - it technically qualifies, but it's filtered through so much Americana that it barely counts.
This is the only P.F. Chang's in Germany and you're not going to visit it unless you have access to Ramstein Air Base. It's exclusively operated by people affiliated with the U.S. military in some way, which might be cause for concern considering the itinerant life of the typical military member and the lack of incentive for generating profits on the same level as the rest of the chain's locations. There's little cause for concern at the moment - you walk into the restaurant and there's little to distinguish this location from one back in the States, aside from maybe a beer menu that has a few more German options than you might normally find.
The food, too, is what you'd expect: a large quantity of grilled or fried meats tossed with some cheap vegetables seared on a ripping hot wok and covered in a sauce much too sweet for German tastes. Is it possible to walk out of this restaurant without leftovers? I don't think so.
Whether the level of food and service can stand the test of time remains to be seen. As for right now, it's exactly the right kind of respite from the realities of being a foreigner in a strange country. It's not easy living abroad, especially for the families of the servicemembers. To have a little corner where you can forget about the rigorous procedural-based German lifestyle and get a taste of home, is welcome. What began as a way for a Chinese family to share a taste of their home has evolved into a way for American families to remind themselves of the same thing. read more