Like my opinion matters... Tsing Tao (restaurant review)

Seems like I'm favoring restaurants in the southern part of the county recently but that's primarily because of recommendations from friends...  I'm really an equal opportunity restaurant patron so if you have other recommendations, please feel free to make them. Always looking for a new place to try, especially those smaller, locally-owned places that you might not otherwise hear about.  Today, we went for a late lunch to Tsing Tao, a Chinese restaurant next to the Payson Walmart.

We got there at 3:10, right after the lunch specials ended, and there were more people there than I would have expected at kind of an odd time.  Right away we noticed on the menu that you could turn any entree into a combination dinner, something I really like so that you don't rack up a big bill by ordering soup, egg rolls, and everything else separately.  Despite that, I still ordered an appetizer of Crab Rangoon since that is one of my favorites. 

The Crab Rangoon was excellent!  More cream cheese/crab filling in each one than I've typically seen and fried to a perfect crispiness.  Five stars for the Crab Rangoon!

Each of us ordered a separate combination dinner thinking that we could easily share like you typically do at a Chinese restaurant.  They weren't served family-style, but it was still easy enough to divide up the entrees and share.  I ordered the honey sauce with chicken (the parsimonious might just call it honey chicken...), Kim ordered beef with broccoli, and Rebel ordered sweet and sour pork. 

The food was good, maybe not exceptional but definitely good.  My favorite was probably the beef with broccoli-- despite the fact that there was green stuff on the plate that was probably a vegetable...  Ok, so I know what a vegetable looks like but it seems like I don't typically see enough of them.  Vegetables are good when you don't have to cook them yourself!  I was a little surprised that the honey chicken seemed to be just fried pieces of chicken with honey poured on top.  Very sweet, but could have used some sort of a spice to kick the flavor up a bit.  I felt like a sticky mess after eating it and thought that it would have really been fun(ny) to watch a child eat it and see what they looked like afterward!  Maybe not funny for the parent of that said child though...  The sweet and sour pork tasted like it typically does-- and I was glad to see that the sauce wasn't the bright orange sauce that you sometimes get at restaurants. 

I enjoyed our lunch and thought the restaurant was good.  I would give it 3 stars-  and will go back when I am in the area.