Review: The originator of Panda Express is back. Is the new orange chicken better?

Servers at the newly reopened Panda Inn restaurant in Pasadena glide around the dining room with massive trays hoisted over their shoulders, each one overflowing with platters of orange chicken, bowls of hot and sour soup and orders of mu shu pork. If food running were an Olympic sport, I’d bet on team Panda Inn.

For someone who grew up going to the much darker, lower-ceilinged original restaurant, the new Panda Inn digs are unrecognizable. And a newfound, brighter energy is palpable, with a dining room that swells with diners even in the middle of the afternoon.

Reservations for both prime-time evening and daytime tables have been difficult to procure, and the first question you’ll be greeted with at the host counter is if you have one.

A semi-circular driveway leads to the entrance of the newly remodeled Panda Inn, the restaurant that spawned thousands of Panda Expresses.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

The restaurant is divided into several dining areas, including private dining rooms with tables large enough for a small banquet.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

Andrew Cherng and his father, chef Ming-Tsai Cherng, opened Panda Inn on a sleepy stretch of Foothill Boulevard in 1973. Andrew and his wife, Peggy, would later go on to introduce the first Panda Express at the Glendale Galleria food court a decade later.

Now, the Panda Restaurant Group includes more than 2,600 Panda Express locations worldwide and four Panda Inns in Southern California. The company also is both a franchise operator and an investor in restaurants such as Hibachi-San, Uncle Tetsu, Yakiya, Raising Cane’s and Whataburger.

In its previous incarnation, the Pasadena Panda Inn was where you went before a school dance, met the extended family for birthday parties or found yourself on a Wednesday night because it was the only place everyone could agree on.

The new Panda Inn

Last November, the restaurant reopened after a complete overhaul and renovations that took nearly two years to complete. Now it’s a bustling Chinese American brasserie in an area of town known more for its chain-heavy strip malls than destination dining.

The entrance, which once faced the San Gabriel Mountains, now looks west, accessible past the sort of half-moon driveway you might find at some of the finer McMansions in town. There’s a plush red carpet leading up to the front door, flanked on either side by two outdoor seating areas.

Artwork with Chinese motifs decorates the bar, where you can order cocktails such as yuzu lemon drops. Chef Aiguo Yang, executive chef at the newly remodeled Panda Inn. (Shelby Moore / For The Times)

The dining room is vastly hipper and more upscale, with high ceilings, warm wood walls and a sleek floor that shines like marble. The space is broken into five main sections, with private rooms, semi-private booths hidden in elaborate alcoves, a full bar slinging yuzu lemon drops and even a sushi bar.

It may look different, but its warmth is oddly familiar, bringing to mind the sweeping dining rooms of chains like Din Tai Fung. While lunching with deputy food editor Betty Hallock, she remarked that though she’d never been to the original, it somehow felt nostalgic.

Even if you’ve never dined at a Panda Inn, you’re likely familiar with the specific brand of American Chinese food it helped popularize. Dishes like orange chicken and General Tso’s chicken became part of the greater American culinary vernacular in the woks of the Panda restaurants.

On a recent visit, I heard a server tell his table that this is indeed the original Chinese American restaurant. And that yes, everyone orders the orange chicken.

The Panda restaurants may have made the greatest contribution to Chinese American cuisine in the last century. The most widely accepted origin story for orange chicken comes from Andy Kao, who is credited with inventing the dish at a Panda Express in Hawaii in 1987. Loosely based on a chicken dish spiked with citrus peel from the Hunan province in China, he first prepared it with skin-on, bone-in chicken.

One of the Panda Inn signature dishes is crispy Panda beef — with an orange-chicken-adjacent sauce and served with fanned snow peas.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

Panda Inn is where beef and broccoli, mountains of fat, chewy chow fun slick with soy and sizzling soup are all the apotheosis of the Chinese American stalwarts. But the new Panda Inn is a restaurant ambitiously reaching for a wider audience, and the chance to turn more regional Chinese dishes into new classics.

Echoed in the artwork behind the bar and on the menu’s new pages is an attempt to bring the Cherng family’s journey to America to life. Panda Inn executive chef Aiguo Yang expanded the original menu with dishes that have roots in Yangzhou, China; Taipei, Taiwan; and Yokohama, Japan, all areas significant to the Cherng family.

The braised lion’s head meatballs are a regional specialty of the Yangzhou province, where both Ming-Tsai and Yang are from. They come as four orbs the size of tennis balls (they’re meant to evoke the shape of the head of a Chinese guardian lion) immersed in a rich, thick brown gravy over a bed of wilted cabbage. They’re soft, supple and barely formed, like giant balls of juicy dumpling filling.

The braised lion’s head meatballs are a nod to the founding family’s Yangzhou roots — orbs of barely held-together meat in a brown gravy.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

There’s an attempt at flair with a few of the tableside preparations. Mapo tofu is transferred from a bowl to a sizzling pot just before service. The presentation is a bit of a flop, but the mapo tofu is an exemplary version of the Sichuan dish, with soft, silky tofu in a deeply savory red sauce. The heat is accumulative but not terribly aggressive in spice, and the bits of water chestnut offer freshness and crunch.

Yang said that nearly 40% of the menu’s dishes are new, with items like Taiwanese popcorn chicken, representative of the years Ming-Tsai and Andrew lived in Taiwan. The geographic history of the Cherng family provides a loose throughline for the menu, but not all of the new additions fit neatly into place.

The mango tea smoked duck salad involves a bed of romaine lettuce with shreds of smoked duck, crispy wontons, fresh mango, honey walnuts and banana chips in a sweet champagne dressing. It’s a conundrum of a salad I ordered multiple times, trying to draw out the logic of this particular combination of components. If I combine the banana chip with duck, will it make sense? What if I add a walnut to the party? I’m still undecided. One of my dining companions simply called the salad “unfathomable,” but we continued to clean our plates.

New to Panda Inn is the sushi bar, where solo diners and couples often find seats without reservations. On the new menu: olive flounder sashimi.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

A desire to honor Ming-Tsai’s time as a chef in Yokohama means that there is a team of five people who prepare nigiri, sashimi and maki rolls at a dedicated sushi bar. Tucked into the back of the restaurant, it’s mostly populated with couples and singles who walked in without a reservation. But if you’d like to have an omakase experience, the chefs will oblige.

The sushi bar is where the Chinese American brand (which the Panda restaurants have so painstakingly worked to establish) gets muddled in an overzealous play at fusion. Hong Kong-style shrimp with mayonnaise is reimagined as a shrimp tempura roll, but the best components of the dish — the crunch of the shrimp, the balance of the sauce and the sweetness of the nuts — get lost in the rice.

Squares of eel are splayed over a torched, cut California roll with a mascarpone foam and the restaurant’s chile eel sauce. The creamy Italian cheese and eel do not make great friends in a maki roll.

If you’re intent on having sushi, the sashimi tends to be more focused. Slivers of olive flounder are dusted with nutty dry miso and fanned out onto an eye-widening sauce made from yuzu and ponzu.

What about the orange chicken?

As for the famous orange chicken, the Panda Inn version is the one you know and love from the food court steam tray, only served at a temperature that implies it took mere seconds to get to your table, with a lighter, much crisper coating and a glaze that clings rather than goops. The intense orange flavor is more sun-ripened citrus than artificial and there’s a whisper of chile heat that slices through the sweetness. Every other orange chicken, whether in your neighborhood Chinese restaurant, freezer aisle or even the Panda Express near you, will pale in comparison.

If this orange chicken tastes better than what you’re remembering, that’s because it is. According to chef Jimmy Wang, executive director of product innovation and development at Panda Express, the Pasadena Panda Inn bumped up the citrus with both orange zest and peel in the new recipe.

Wang said they also made some adjustments to the signature Panda beef, a dish of crispy, fried sliced beef tossed in a light, sweet and sour sauce. The specific frying process leaves the beef tender and the coating brittle. The sauce is adjacent to the orange chicken but with a less specific citrus flavor.

Most of the people sitting at the sushi bar are actually hunched over plates of orange chicken or Panda beef.

The new Panda Inn is a sushi bar, a budding Yangzhou specialist and the Chinese American neighborhood restaurant you love. If you try to experience them all at once, it can feel a little disjointed. Pick one (or even two), and it’s exactly the place you want to be.