So much to choose from at Dragon Phoenix

By WILMA NORTON, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 25, 2000

Faced with a long, intriguing menu, I once again managed to buy about twice as much food as we needed for a Monday night dinner.

I called Dragon Phoenix, which has a St. Petersburg address but is technically in Seminole, and asked to have a menu faxed to me. It arrived promptly, filled with Chinese standards, but also with several chef's specials that sounded a step above the usual fare.

I placed my order and arrived 20 minutes later to find the food tightly packaged. It withstood the 20-minute ride home without a leak or spill.

The restaurant is on Bay Pines Boulevard just across the Bay Pines bridge from the Tyrone area. It is across the street from the VA Medical Center.

We started with the soup.

The broth of the Dragon and Phoenix soup ($4.50) was a combination of wonton and eggdrop and filled with tiny shrimp, chicken, peas, carrots and green onions. The menu says it serves two, but three of us had a bowl with some left over. We also liked the wide, crispy noodles that came with the soup.

We weren't sure what to expect from the multitaste chicken ($10.95), one of the house specialties. The menu described it as "three different tastes of chicken on one dish."

What we found when we opened the plastic container was a sampling of three traditional Chinese chicken dishes, kept from running together for the most part by separations in the carton. There was a large serving of kung pao chicken, a slightly smaller serving of moo goo gai pan and a small helping of sweet and sour chicken.

As it turned out, we all liked kung pao best, the moo goo gai pan second, and the sweet and sour was our least favorite.

The kung pao was chock-full of peanuts, cubed chicken and crunchy cubes of carrot, celery and water chestnut. The menu lists the dish as spicy. We all, including our kids, like our food with some heat. This had more punch than most Chinese food, but it was not nearly as intense as we have come to expect in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine.

The moo goo gai pan, which is a bit bland for our taste, was still nice with ample strips of chicken and crunchy snowpeas. The sweet and sour was coated in a light, crisp batter. Of course, it came with that amazingly colored sweet red sauce.

We finished the soup, my daughter's egg roll ($1) and the chicken entrees, and I commented that, for once, we didn't run out of white rice. (I had ordered extra, but only got one container. We never seem to have enough rice.)

Then we realized we had forgotten all about the string beans and broccoli. And we were full.

We cracked open the container for a taste. The vegetables were cooked in a delicious garlic sauce, not too overpowering, but with that bit of spicy burn we so favor. Cooked too long, it turned out. The string beans were limp, a victim of too much steam. The broccoli also had lost its crunch and passed from that delicious bright green to the soggy darker green.

Dragon Phoenix is known among our friends and acquaintances as a place with crisp vegetables, so perhaps this was an isolated incident.

The other vegetable dishes include eggplant in garlic sauce, Szechuan-style bean curd, orange bean curd and snowpea pods and water chestnuts. They are priced from $6.50 to $7.50.

The beef, chicken and poultry entrees come in pints or quarts. Most of the chicken and pork dishes, including cashew chicken, chicken with broccoli, twice cooked pork, and Hunan pork, are $3.95 for a pint and $7.25 for a quart. The beef dishes, such as pepper steak, Mongolian beef and beef with Chinese vegetables, are $4.25 a pint or $7.95 a quart.

It is the chef's specials that are the most interesting and most difficult to choose among. A sampling:

Szechuan-style soft-shell crab ($12.95); the Sea Dragon (crabmeat, lobster, prawns and scallops with broccoli, mushrooms, snow peas, baby corn and water chestnuts for $12.95); the filet orange steak (filet mignon, battered and fried, sauteed with orange peel and broccoli for $10.95); and the I Don't Know (sliced white-meat chicken sauteed in a secret sauce for $8.75).

There are also two styles of Peking duck for $24. And the chef's treble tribute ($24) serves two with crabmeat, scallops, chicken, beef and roast pork sauteed in brown sauce with Chinese vegetables, surrounded by fried wontons, fantail shrimp and boneless chicken.

The restaurant offers daily lunch specials for $4 to $6.75, all served with fried or white rice, an egg roll and a choice of egg drop, wonton or hot and sour soup.

Dragon Phoenix

• 9621 Bay Pines Blvd.

• St. Petersburg

• Phone: (727) 399-8646; fax: (727) 397-4126

• Hours: 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday; noon to 10 p.m. Saturday; 4 to 9:30 p.m. Sunday

• Consumers: Two adults and one child

• What we got: An egg roll, Dragon and Phoenix soup for two, string beans and broccoli with garlic sauce and multitaste chicken

• What it cost: $25.35

• Time it took: 20 minutes

• Pay with: Cash, checks, major credit cards

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