9 P.F. Chang's Frozen Meals, Ranked Worst To Best

I've been to P.F. Chang's roughly a dozen times over the last 10 years or so, but I've never once strayed past the appetizer menu. Once I got my first taste of the lettuce wraps — which, as true fans know, is the chain's top-selling menu item — I knew there was no other dish for me. I'd sometimes grab a plate on the way home from work and snack on it later in front of the TV after putting the kids to bed for the night.

Now that I'm living and working an hour outside the nearest major metro, however, those occasional P.F. Chang's stops are a thing of the past. Fortunately, though, there's a whole menu of P.F. Chang's entrees in the freezer section of my local Meijer. While nothing can compare to my beloved lettuce wraps (which, sadly, are not part of the home menu), I was thrilled to get my hands on them. Would they come close to a restaurant-quality meal on a budget, or would they find themselves among the ranks of store-bought frozen meals to avoid? Though all of the dishes I tried for this ranking were delicious, one was as good as getting it to go from the restaurant.

The sweet and sour chicken from P.F. Chang's Home Menu comes in at the bottom of this ranking. It has breaded chicken, colorful bell peppers, and pineapple glazed with sweet and sour sauce. I'm a huge fan of pineapple in just about everything — including on pizza — so almost as soon as I'd pulled it from the skillet, I dug in.

The pineapple, peppers, and sauce are to die for. The sauce is extremely sweet, of course, but much more balanced than I expected. The sourness is more like fresh lemons than citric acid, which I appreciate. The downside, though, is the unignorable nugget-ness of the chicken. In this case, I don't mind it much — mainly because I get sweet and sour sauce with my chicken nuggets at Wendy's, too — but it's still just a little bit bizarre to me. Having never tried these specific dishes in person at a P.F. Chang's restaurant, I don't know if this is how they are in-house, but the chicken pieces on the official menu certainly look much smaller and less uniform than the ones on my plate.

Overall, it's better than most sweet and sour chicken I've had. I like that the sweet and sour sauce — which has a surprisingly complex history — isn't overwhelmingly sweet, nor is it making me dread the heartburn I might have later. I just can't get around the weirdness of the chicken. Give me a bowl of nothing but pineapple and peppers in this sauce, though, and I'll eat it all day.

General Tso's chicken — named for a real Qing Dynasty general — was my go-to order at Chinese restaurants for years, so I was stoked to try General Chang's chicken, P.F. Chang's twist on it. The dish features hunks of breaded chicken with broccoli and sliced red peppers in a sweet chili sauce. The vegetables are tender without losing their crispness, and the sauce is lightly sweet with just a little heat. With this meal coming from a chain that goes through a wild amount of sriracha each day, I would have liked a bit more of a kick to it, but it's still enough spice to add some complexity to the whole palate.

The chicken is okay — it's seasoned all the way through, but like the sweet and sour chicken, it has a sort of chicken nugget vibe that makes it feel out of place, even when it's tossed in the same sauce as everything else. Though the dish as a whole is tasty, it's certainly not the one I would reach for first.

The orange chicken was the biggest surprise of the day. Don't get me wrong — I don't hate orange chicken. If I go to a Chinese buffet, I'm not leaving without grabbing a helping of it. But generally, it's not something I would order as a whole entree. It's just a bit too sweet for me.

But that's not the case with P.F. Chang's orange chicken. It's definitely sweet, of course — it wouldn't be orange chicken if it wasn't — but it's not overwhelmingly so, and it has the freshest-tasting orange flavor I think I've ever had on orange chicken. The label claims the orange sauce is spicy, but I can't find a bit of heat in it. I do love the trifecta of veggies here. The carrots are incredibly tender — not mushy, but about as close to it as you can get. The edamame is slightly firmer, and the water chestnuts are insanely crisp. It's like a study in contrast, and it makes the whole dish super interesting.

Like the other breaded chicken stovetop dishes on P.F. Chang's Home Menu, the orange chicken pieces have a somewhat nugget-like consistency. Maybe it's the size of the pieces — they're an entire mouthful on their own, massive compared to any takeout orange chicken I've ever had — or maybe it's the breading, which seems slightly different from the breading on the chicken in the oven-baked dishes. But it works, somehow, in a way the chicken in General Chang's did not. Best of all, I'm pretty sure my kids would enjoy it, and I may start keeping it in my freezer for that reason alone.

P.F. Chang's beef and broccoli keeps it classic — broccoli and marinated beef in a garlic soy sauce. It's simple but very tasty. The broccoli florets and long strips of thinly sliced beef are perfectly tender, and the sauce is savory with a slightly pungent earthiness that isn't super obvious with the first bite but lingers long after the last one. It clings to the beef and veggies really nicely, much better than the thin, watery sauces I often get from Chinese takeout places.

My only complaint about the beef and broccoli is that the 11- to 13-minute cooking time on the package is just a smidge too long. Even with frequent stirring, the sauce tends to stick to the bottom of the pan and scorch. Don't get me wrong — I like a little char on my beef and my broccoli. What I don't love is having to scrub burnt sauce out of the bottom of the pan after dinner.

P.F. Chang's honey chicken is made with breaded tempura chicken in honey garlic sauce. The breading is lightly crisp — not soggy, but not crunchy either. I would prefer it to be a bit crispier, which is fine, because there is a crispy version, though I got that in a different flavor. The chicken itself is savory and tender, and the sauce is sweet, but the honey flavor isn't as in-your-face as I would like. After all, it's called honey chicken, so I was really looking for the distinctly floral flavor of honey. But the earthy garlic flavor seems to overwhelm the dish. I'm not mad at it at all — it's a darn tasty sauce — it just comes across a little more one-note than I anticipated. There's no spice at all, and though I like a little heat, I can appreciate the mildness of this because I could probably convince my kids to eat it if I called it "sauced nuggets."

The main thing I like about the honey chicken, though, is the ease of preparation. Just thaw the sauce in warm water, toss the chicken in the oven, set a timer, and wait. No flipping, no shaking, just set it and forget it. It only takes about 15 minutes to prepare from start to finish. The main thing I dislike, though, is that it doesn't come with a starch, so I can't really call it a meal. At minimum, I would have to make some rice with it, and though P.F. Chang's does have microwave rice in the frozen section, I have a hard time paying five bucks for something that would cost a few pennies to make. The lack of rice takes a lot of the convenience out of the dish, which is a bummer.

P.F. Chang's crispy sesame chicken features tempura-breaded chicken tossed in a savory-sweet sesame sauce. The chicken is slightly crispier than the regular tempura chicken in the honey chicken, but after about 5 minutes in the sauce, it really doesn't make that much of a difference. The sauce is super yummy — a nice balance between the sweet and savory flavors, with the distinct aroma and nuttiness of sesame.

There's honestly very little difference between the crispy sesame chicken and the honey chicken. Lining them up side by side and tasting them one after the other, the only thing that really sets the two apart is the sesame flavor. And like the honey chicken, there's no heat in the sesame sauce, so while I wouldn't reach for this for a solo dinner or date night, I'd definitely grab it from the freezer when my kids are around, and I want something more interesting than chicken nuggets for dinner. And since they're sauced separately, I could just tell my kids that they are chicken nuggets while I hoard all the sauce for myself.

And again, the crispy sesame chicken meal is all meat, with no starch or vegetable included. To make it a meal means making more work, and while rice is quick enough to steam up, on a busy weeknight when I want to wash as few dishes as possible, I'd prefer a frozen meal that actually includes the whole meal.

I've never had dan dan noodles before, at P.F. Chang's or anywhere else, so I had no idea what to expect from this dish going in. It's made with lo mein (not to be confused with chow mein) noodles, ground pork, scallions, and sesame seeds in a brown sauce. The sauce is savory and heavy on the umami flavor with more heat than most of the other dishes I tried — which is a bonus for me. The ground pork is crumbled throughout the dish, and the long, slender scallions brighten the whole thing up. The noodles are cooked through but still pleasantly firm, and the whole dish is really enjoyable to eat, pushing this meal into the top three of my ranking.

It's also one of the few P.F. Chang's Home Menu dishes that I would consider a true meal. Whereas most of the other dishes are just the entree, requiring you, the consumer, to provide the rice, the dan dan noodles come with protein, carbs, and veg in one tidy little package. I'm a big fan of this dish. My only complaint is that, while the individual meal version includes shiitake mushrooms, I didn't see a single one anywhere in the 2.5-serving bag. It definitely has a mushroom flavor, but the mushrooms themselves are nowhere to be found.

Like the dan dan noodles, P.F. Chang's chicken lo mein is more like a complete meal than most of the other dishes I tried. It's got lo mein noodles, chicken breast, carrots, celery, cabbage, and mushrooms in a rich, sticky sauce. I love the earthy flavor of the sauce, and all the vegetables are cooked just right. The chicken is even tender and moist which, in my experience, is rare in frozen dinners. And unlike the other stovetop chicken dishes I tried for this ranking, it uses unbreaded chicken, thus avoiding the nugget trap.

The sauce caramelizes in a way that makes it much darker than what's shown on the label, but that's fine by me. It also clings to every last bite like its life depends on it, so there's not a dry bite in the entire dish. The plate is super filling, and it's also the fastest-cooking of all the P.F. Chang's dishes I tried at under 10 minutes from start to finish. But there's one dish that was even better.

P.F. Chang's Mongolian style beef is made with marinated beef that's thinly sliced, onions, red peppers, and green beans in a sweet and savory sauce. Though it still lacks the rice necessary to call it a complete meal, it's definitely my favorite of all the dishes I tried, thus earning the No. 1 spot in this ranking. The beef is so tender, it literally melts in your mouth, but the firmness of the green beans gives it a beautiful texture contrast. I love the red peppers — huge, soft chunks and lots of them — and the sauce is absolutely spot on.

Where some sweet-and-savory dishes lean too hard in one direction or the other, P.F. Chang's Mongolian style beef splits the difference right where I like it, with just enough of each flavor to make the other one more interesting. I couldn't stop myself from taking bite after bite, despite the fact that I had three more dishes to taste that day.

I picked up nine frozen meals from P.F. Chang's Home Menu from the freezer section of my local Meijer — the only store in my area that had more than a couple of options. In my selections, I tried to get a variety of options, including oven-baked and skillet meals, and a range of flavors from sweet to spicy.

Since each frozen meal includes enough for 2.5 servings and I was enjoying them by myself, I prepared half of each package by weight, sorting the ingredients manually to keep the proportions correct. Then, I prepared them following the package directions exactly, splitting the difference where time ranges were provided (e.g., 5-7 minutes became 6 minutes), and sampled each one. Finally, based on my taste test, I ranked them from worst (or, in this case, least awesome) to best based on a few key factors: overall flavor, quality of the ingredients, and convenience.