Empire China does Cantonese, Hunan and Szechwan cuisine, and does them well ... dine in, take out,…read moreand catering. (MasterCard and Visa accepted. Gift certificates available.)
The restaurant, on the main floor of what used to be the Ly-Kan Hotel, is closed Mondays. Regular menu business hours are: Lunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Dinner, 3 p.m. to 9 p.m (10 p.m. on Friday).; and Buffet hours are from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.
What the restaurant lacks in decor and atmosphere, it more than makes up for with scrumptious food and excellent service.
The buffet features a very wide variety of dishes ... enough that even a picky eater like me can find plenty to eat!
The lunch special menu lists 33 choices, including 14 hot and spicy dishes that can be modified to your taste. These selections (various pork, chicken, beef, and shrimp dishes, plus two or three vegetable dishes) come with the daily soup, egg roll, and fried rice or steamed rice. Lunch special prices (all prices as of 7/23/2010) range from $5.50 to $5.99.
The menu is incredible! Sixteen appetizers, ranging from chicken sticks, to golden fried to-fu, to sliced jelly fish cold plate, and everything in between! (I love the sugar biscuits, and the crab angels.)
There are nine kinds of soup! The egg drop soup (excellent!) and the hot and sour soup come in a cup (small) for $1.25, or a bowl (large) for $4.50. Be warned, the large order served five or six members of my family the other night. Other soups range from deluxe vegetable soup at $4.99 to seafood to-fu soup at $5.99. I'm not sure about the size of these servings, so ask your server.
Also on offer are a huge variety of pork, poultry, beef, seafood, vegetable, egg fu young, fried rice/chow mein/lo mein, and mu shu dishes.
There are 12 happy hour dinner combination specials that cost $7 or $8. These are served from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.
Twenty-four chef's specials, served with fried or steamed rice, range from Szechwan Triple to Happy Family at $8.99, to Sizzling Peking Pork Chop Hot Platter at $9.99, to West Lake Duck at $10.99, to Seafood in Birds Nest at $11.99, to Whole Fried Fish Cantonese Style at $15.99, and Snow Crab Leg Combination Plate at $19.99. And 17 more choices in between!
Family dinners are available for $9.50 per person or $12.50 per person (a minimum of two people).
For those who aren't crazy about Chinese food, there are side orders that include: French fries, onion rings, hashbrowns, plain fried rice or steamed rice ($1.25 each); vegetable salad, or two eggs ($1.50); chicken nuggets, cheese sticks, bacon strips, or plain noodles (each $2.75).
Everything my family of eight ordered the other night was excellent, and portions were large enough to share without leaving anyone hungry.
Just a note: If you order the Chinese hot tea, it is made with loose tea unless you request the powdered teabag, so there will be little floaty bits in your cup. (You get a whole teapot full of tea.)
Service was flawless. Special requests were honored with a smile.
The main reason I didn't give Empire China the fifth star, is that the dishes served often didn't look anything like the photo on the menu. For example, I ordered the lemon chicken, which was pictured as two sliced, plain, cooked chicken breasts (unbreaded, unbattered), garnished with broccoli and about half a lemon, with lemon sauce on the side., What I got was a lot of small to medium-sized, battered, fried chicken pieces, swimming in lemon sauce, garnished with four pieces of broccoli and a couple slices of lemon. Very tasty, but not at all what I was expecting, and I spent a lot of time peeling the fried coating off the chicken to avoid the extra calories, etc.
If you're in the central part of Kansas and get a craving for Chinese, head for Lyons, and Empire China. You'll be glad you did!
