The Chinese Food Challenge: Liu Garden

Just a few tire spinning strolls off of Route 113 in Skippack is the cozily placed .

Chock full of many meal choices, Liu Garden also does catering with larger portions of the more popular menu picks.

The friendly and familiar early-on chomp choice of fried wonton strips ready for dipping in duck sauce gestures genially, soon after a quick saunter through the entrance.

In the way of appetizers, plump wontons in a lightly spicy peanut sauce wrap around a small plate, incorporating the visual and tongue-ticking aid of a few red pepper seeds for a feisty nibble around the wet of dumpling.

Dragon & Phoenix juxtaposes the often-ordered General Tso’s chicken with a blend of shrimp and a throw of veggies separated by a stout wall of orange slices. Handfuls of shrimp tossed in mildly sweet white sauce offset General Tso’s flavor spells, accompanied by snap peas, baby corn, cabbage, bamboo chunks, carrot, broccoli, celery and mushroom samplings, along with additional carrots shaped as a flower and separately served white rice.

Golden mango chicken, a plentiful-by-the-plate white meat glazed heavily, but quite enjoyably, in the chef’s special ginger-hued sauce, slots in a few squared-off slivers of red and green peppers with its own carrot-inspired blossom.

Even the tiniest desserts squeeze to please post entrée-minutes in their couplings, and those that don’t even make a mark on the final receipt are certainly all the more worth savoring. Freshly fried and served warm, Chinese buffet-style doughnut knobs sprinkled gently in specks of sugar stir a bit of swooning by way of the palate.

Find Liu Garden at 4270 Township Line Road in Skippack, PA 19474.