3/28/2024 0 Comments Lucky panda menu![]() ![]() ![]() Some customers are delighted even before learning the white stuff is chocolate.Ī typical reaction from first-timers: “Oh, they’re dipped in frosting! “ Some 3,000 to 4,000 are served per week, and they are sold by the dozen in organza bags. The cookies are made elsewhere but are hand-dipped in the Ontario restaurant daily and wrapped in one of seven colors of foil. They arrive on a plate, wrapped in foil, and serve as a signal the restaurant wants to impress you.Īs another Yelp commenter wrote, “that white chocolate dipping makes fortune cookies something you eat cause you want to, not just out of boredom. Panda is more adventurous in its catering menu, offering shark’s fin soup and other Chinese delicacies.Ī signature Panda Inn touch is the fortune cookies dipped in white chocolate. The grade on Yelp is 3.5 out of 5, with some recent commenters enthusiastic about the remodeling (“looks like a modern, chic, happening restaurant now,” one wrote) but underwhelmed by the service or food (“wished the food was updated as well,” a second wrote). The Panda Inn menu, unlike the decor, hasn’t been upgraded. ![]() As we chatted, he was near an enormous TV and his eyes kept drifting over to a golf game. The existing two TVs have multiplied into six, with three more coming.Ĭherng seemed impressed. With the CEO of a $1.5 billion company in the house, the wealth is indeed circulating.Īs part of the renovations, the wall separating the entry from the bar has been removed to make the bar more inviting. Even Cherng, who lives in Pasadena, has visited several times. The business community, she said, has responded by scheduling more meetings there. “It has elevated the expectations of our guests,” Coe said. It looks better than I’d ever remembered it, elegant and colorful. As for the red and gold, she said, “we wanted to make the restaurant more festive and vibrant. “Structurally there are a lot of symbolic elements,” Coe said. Hanging lamps in the dining rooms are in the shape of golden birdcages, another sign of prosperity, and there are six of them, another lucky number. (The wait staff must hope some of that circulating wealth wafts onto their tip trays.) In the hallway leading to the dining rooms, columns have been replaced by circular archways, five of them – five being a lucky number, archways allowing the wealth to circulate. Now there’s a lot of red and gold, the colors of wealth. The cost? “Don’t tell our founder,” Coe joked as she showed me around, “but a little over a million dollars. The restaurant was closed during January while an overhaul was undertaken, reopening Feb. Nothing says early ’90s quite like peach, green, aqua and wood trimming. “Peach, green, aqua, a lot of wood trimming,” said Manee Coe, general manager of the Ontario Panda. “This one is the second-highest grossing after Pasadena,” said Gigi Cheung, Panda Inn’s director of operations. Seating capacity is 272, allowing Ontario’s Panda to handle banquets, birthday and wedding parties, baby showers and business functions. (Think of some of the undersized chain stores at Victoria Gardens that clearly hedged their bets, despite a booming area, and compare that to Cherng’s prescience 12 years earlier.) Ontario, I was surprised to learn, is Panda’s largest location, at 87,000 square feet. What surprised me was that Cherng scattered his locations geographically as early as he did, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to put Ontario on par with Santa Monica or San Diego. These days, restaurant chains are more willing to branch out to Inland Empire suburbia. when Cherng chose Ontario as the site of his seventh. In 1992, Panda Inn had restaurants in Pasadena, Glendale, Santa Monica, San Diego, La Palma (in Orange County) and West L.A. A major Cal Poly Pomona donor along with his wife, Peggy, Cherng oversees the Panda empire: six Panda Inn locations and nearly 1,600 Panda Express outlets in the U.S. I missed the event, having been at Upland’s simultaneous State of the City luncheon, but hustled over afterward in hopes of catching Panda executives.Īs hoped, chief executive officer and co-founder Andrew Cherng had not only been there, he was still there. Panda, one in the small chain of white-tablecloth Chinese restaurants, opened in 1992.Īnd now Panda, shaking off its age, has been remodeled, a look shown off last week in a grand reopening. Can it really have been two decades since Panda Inn came to Ontario? It can. ![]()
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