Best China
Memorial Bend Shopping Center (behind IHOP)
5260 Memorial Dr #1205a, Stone Mountain, GA 30083
(404) 296-0405
Monday – Sunday (that’s everyday isn’t it?) 11AM–10:30PM

Best China is a small restaurant with a very friendly staff.  The woman who took my order was all smiles.  I ordered the Kung Pao chicken and had my choice of an egg roll or soda. Egg roll, qing.  Did I want it spicy? Yes. Eat here or takeout? Takeout.
While waiting I took a photo of the wall menu (which was in addition to the traditional printed Chinese food menu)  and it was heavily tilted toward chicken and even more heavily toward chicken  wings. If you are wing person may I suggest Best China? I didn’t try them but if you do let me know.
A super friendly gentleman who looked like he might be the  cook came out with my order. I sprang to the counter and he smiled and opened the styrofoam container to show me my meal. It looked wonderful and to myself I said, “How nice was that?”  And for only $5.95!
I jumped on my scooter and headed home to taste my piping hot Kung Pao chicken.
Home I dove right in. First impression: not very spicy. I really wanted to like this dish because the people were so darn nice.  But I am sad to report that overall it was pretty ordinary.  The vegetable were ok, the sauce ok, water chestnuts tasted of the can, and the rice, dammit!, was just ok. I love a good dish of rice and so I  must say ok almost means not ok, but it was ok.  The egg roll also was not memorable (crunchy on the outside, meh on the inside)  but you may  like to know that the chicken was good. Small strips of tasty chicken if you wrangled them separately from the vegetables. And that in a nutshell is the best I can say of the Kung Pao chicken at Best China.  Add some soy sauce and sriracha  and it definitely improves. So, it’s ok enough for me turn on John Oliver and have an ok meal. So ok already. Rating for Best China’s Kung Pao chicken? 2.67 – meh. (rating system) Please go there and get something and let me know what you think. They are SO nice!  OK? OK.

The History of Kung Pao Chicken (click Kung Pao or just read here)

Kung Pao Chicken (called 宫保鸡丁; Gong Bao’s Diced Chicken in Chinese) is named after the dish’s most famous fan, or at least that’s how the story goes. At the beginning of the 19th century, a boy named Ding Baozhen fell into a river. He couldn’t swim, and would have drowned were it not for the intervention of a passing stranger, who managed to drag him to safety.

Ding grew up and attained the rank of Gong Bao at a government post in Sichuan province. While there, he thought to visit the home of the man who rescued him as a boy to pay his respects.

At the man’s home, he ate a remarkable dish with diced chicken, peanuts, and Sichuan peppercorns, among other ingredients, and liked it so much that he asked for the recipe. Thereafter, he ate the dish often and served it to all of his guests, thus spreading its popularity around the province. He was such a fan that the dish came to be referred to as “Gong Bao Chicken”; a reference to Ding’s official rank.

Kung Pao Chicken is, for reasons explained above, considered part of Sichuan cuisine, but these days you can get the dish at most restaurants in China, and almost every Chinese restaurant outside it. Chinese people often chuckle at foreigners’ reliance on the dish — Kung Pao Chicken is a veritable staple at the tables of most China expats — but the fact is that Ding Baozhen was right to promote the dish so widely two centuries ago; virtually everyone agrees that it tastes great.

There are big differences in how Kung Pao Chicken tastes depending on where you eat it, though. Generally, the dish is spiciest in its native province of Sichuan, where chefs often insist on using only local (and very spicy) peppers and peppercorns in the recipe. Outside Sichuan it is often milder, as most people don’t like quite as much spicy heat in their meals as the Sichuanese do.