At Emperor of China, The Leftovers Are Part of The Plan

Emperor of China. Photo by Cari Taylor-Carlson.

For 40 years Emperor of China has served Milwaukee with its Chinese cuisine.

The menu overwhelms with its selection of about 100 entrees and includes a variety of pork, duck, beef, seafood, chicken, and vegetarian dishes. On top of that, you can add five kinds of soup, half a dozen appetizers, six varieties of fried rice and a medley of egg foo young. This is a complicated menu requiring some serious study.

After two lunches, my companions and I barely scratched the surface of this multi-layered menu, but here is what we ate and what we thought about what we ate: An appetizer, the fried vegetable spring roll, burst with vegetables. It was stuffed, fat and delivered to the table still sizzling from the fryer. Its served with a hot mustard sauce and a classic sweet and sour sauce. If you dine in, you need to order a spring roll separately, but when you order a takeout combo box, the spring roll comes with your meal along with one crab rangoon and vegetable fried rice.

Instead of a spring roll and a crab rangoon, when you dine-in, your meal includes a large cup of egg drop soup topped with crisp strips of fried wonton. As my companion noted, the soup was “very eggy.” It was thick and needed soy sauce to build in more flavor.

The sizzling chicken rice soup, a bowl filled with plenty of chicken, pea pods, cabbage and mushrooms, was topped with two cubes of puffed rice that looked like Rice Krispies. They were the sizzle and the rice part of the chicken rice soup.

My companion and I thought it was likely that the beef with broccoli and the beef with pea pods shared the same sauce. Both dishes could have included more slices of the tender beef along with the broccoli, pea pods, cabbage and a large serving of vegetarian egg fried rice.

On a subsequent visit, the chicken with broccoli had a light sauce, a lot of chicken and broccoli that was especially delicious, bright green and cooked just enough to soften the stems while keeping the rest of it crunchy.

The restaurant served the mu shu pork with the traditional crepes. I layered a spoonful of the pork and some hoisin sauce in the crepe, rolled it up like a little cigar, and before I got it to my mouth, the crepe sprung a leak. Our server suggested I scoop with the crepe instead. It made a delicious hand-held mess, pork, cabbage, green onions, hoisin sauce and scraps of crepe all scooped into many delicious bites. There was also enough for two more meals at home where I substituted softened flour tortillas for the crepes and because the dish was so tasty, I was not going to let a bite go anywhere except into my mouth. Our server sent me home with a large container of hoisin sauce, a necessary and tasty addition to the traditional mu shu pork.

Emperor of China does a lot of takeout as evidenced by the list of 32 takeout combo boxes. Many are marked with a little red pepper that suggests hot and spicy.

My companions and I left with full bellies, doggie bags, and our fortunes. My fortune read, “You will win success in whatever calling you adopt.” I’ll take that.

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• Location: 1010 E. Brady St.
• Phone: 414-271-8889
• Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.
• Website: https://emperorofchinarestaurant.com

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