“That’s Jimmy’s place. Been there since before most of these strip malls even had tenants.” That’s how a longtime Richardson resident once described Peking Garden to a newcomer asking where to find real Chinese food in the area — not the buffet kind, not the delivery-app-optimized kind, but the kind where a family actually runs the room.
Jimmy Chen has worked the dining room at Peking Garden, on Greenville Avenue near the Arapaho corridor, for longer than many of his current regulars have lived in Richardson. His parents opened the restaurant in the early 1980s, and the bones of the place reflect that era — red booths, a tea cart that actually circulates, menu photos that have been on the laminated pages since roughly the Clinton administration. None of that is a complaint. The consistency is the point.
What keeps people coming back, beyond habit, is a kitchen that handles the fundamentals with real confidence. The Peking duck, ordered a day ahead, is the thing to build a visit around. It comes carved tableside — crisp lacquered skin, thin pancakes, hoisin, scallion — and it’s the kind of dish that reminds you why this style of cooking earned its reputation. Jimmy typically checks in during the carving, not in a performative way, just to make sure the table has what it needs.
The rest of the menu ranges widely. The hot-and-sour soup is exactly as thick and peppery as it should be. The Mongolian beef has enough wok char to justify its price. Mapo tofu shows up on the menu here — not always a given at older American Chinese restaurants — and it’s made with enough heat to be taken seriously. Lunch specials run around eight to eleven dollars and draw a steady crowd of office workers from the surrounding business parks who have been eating here on rotation for years.
The dining room seats maybe seventy, with a private area in the back that families book for birthday dinners and retirement parties. On a weekend evening, the parking lot fills early. There’s no reservation app, no QR code menu — you call, or you just show up. The wait on a Friday night rarely exceeds twenty minutes, and the tea arrives before you’ve fully settled in.
Jimmy’s daughter has started helping out on weekends, seating tables, running dishes. Whether that represents succession or just extra hands isn’t something the family has made a production of. It’s a working restaurant, not a story it’s trying to tell about itself.
Prices are honest. A full dinner for two with duck, a vegetable dish, and soup runs around sixty to seventy dollars before drinks and tip. A lunch for one is closer to ten. Neither feels like a deal designed to lure you in — they feel like what the food actually costs to make properly.
Peking Garden doesn’t advertise much. It doesn’t have to. The regulars know the phone number by heart, and new arrivals in Richardson tend to find it within a year through word of mouth. That’s a decent measure of a restaurant’s standing in a city — not how many Instagram tags it gets, but whether the people who’ve lived there longest still choose it when they want a reliable, well-cooked meal without any fuss.
