It should be noted that there are two Z & Y restaurants in close proximity to each other, and the one we went to was the Peking Duck restaurant.

First Friday Feast is a monthly series debuting on the first Friday of each month and elaborates on a recent dining experience.

We’ve been trying to have a date night each month this year (and post about it on the first Friday of every month). Sometimes we bring the kids along for date night and sometimes they stay at home. But that’s fine by us–the kids are more than welcome to tag along if they want. In this case, we ended up having a large family meal here.

We arrived at around 5PM, in time for our dinner reservation. The restaurant has both an upstairs area and a downstairs. Given the size of our party, we were escorted downstairs. As you might expect, there are no windows down here and not much indication on the time of day. The restaurant considers the upstairs area to be more modern while the downstairs is more traditional. I can buy it.

We had both a large circle table in the rear of the restaurant and a four-top. We stuck the kids over on the small table but there was one empty seat. Want to take a guess on who the lucky one was?

The Z & Y Peking Duck Menu

Once you open up the menu, you’ll find the main star of the show prominently on the first page. The menu focuses on a variety of other Chinese dishes, like dim sum and seafood.

The Food at Z & Y

Peking Duck

If you want to order Peking Duck, there is a reference on Yelp that you need to order in advance. And if you play around on their website, you’ll find a note about the Peking Duck requiring a reservation and that it comes with 18-20 wrappers.

We ordered two Peking Ducks, which was a decent amount for the table. The website and menu seemed to imply there would be a tableside carving, but I don’t recall seeing one. But the duck had good flavor with a crispy skin. The accompanying items were pretty much what you would expect. It’s delicious and it’s one of the best dishes they make.

Strangely, we only received 10 wrappers per duck, despite what the website implied. We asked staff about the amount of wrappers and they denied it came with anything more than 10. If we wanted more, we would have to pay another $6 for another 10 wrappers. More so than anything else, I wish confusing information on their own website didn’t contradict what they told us.

Duck webs with mustard sauce

Duck feet aren’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. If you’re used to chicken feet phoenix claws at dim sum, you might be happy to know that these duck feet are boneless. The flavor and texture of the duck webs were good and it had a bit of a mustard sauce. Arguably, this is one of their better dishes.

Wine chicken

Holy moly, this was an intoxicated chicken! I’ve come to believe that the chicken drowned its sorrows with hard liquor before it died. This drunken chicken dish absolutely needs something else that’s bland to balance the flavors (like white rice). On its own, it was difficult for us to eat. We didn’t let the kids eat this one, and it was perhaps for the best.

Xiao long bao

We ordered a few sets of xiao long bao (soup dumplings) to share. The flavor of the xiao long bao is fine, but they did not hold up well at all. Some of them seemed to immediately fall apart once we picked them up. It was extraordinarily difficult to keep the soup inside the dumpling, especially considering there was no soup spoon. Also missing were distilled black vinegar and ginger that you’d typically eat with the dumplings.

Alex, our eight-year-old son, has developed into a bit of a xiao long bao connoisseur. It’s one of his favorite dishes and he actively seeks it out every restaurant we go to. One of his favorites comes from Din Tai Fung. According to Alex, he said it wasn’t that good here. A lot of his opinion is based on how they didn’t hold the soup, which ruins that delicious combination of all the flavors melding together.

Shrimp and beef chow mein

It’s chow mein, and not all that different from what any Chinese restaurant serves. It’s an oily dish and offers plenty of carbs. It works if you’re looking for a filler item for the table, but that’s about it. I wish I had more to say about the dishes.

White wine garlic clams

These were large clams, packed with plenty of plump meat. Eating them, you could taste the freshness and good flavor. Oddly enough, the server warned us of alcohol in this dish and said not to give it to kids, but we didn’t taste alcohol at all. Could the server have just been confused between this dish and the wine chicken dish? Before you think there was a language barrier, we had plenty of native speakers in our group without the need to speak in English to the staff.

Yangzhou fried rice

Again, a very standard dish that ended up not having anything memorable. If you’ve had one fried rice, you’ve had them all. The one good thing I’d say is that it would help balance the flavors of the wine chicken. Are you complaining that I keep talking about that wine chicken this far down into the roll call of the menu items we ate? It really was that impactful to the whole experience.

Pea sprouts with garlic

We always try to add in a minimum of one vegetable dish for the table to share. The pea sprouts were good and helped provide some balance to the meat and carbs.

Miso sea bass

The miso sea bass was deliciously flaky. While a number of dishes here were hit or miss, I’d commend the chef on the preparation of the sea bass. Along with the Peking Duck and duck webs, this is one of the three best dishes we had here.

A note about the bill…

Before I sum up our experience here, I want to call out an annoyance. Z & Y Peking Duck tacks on a 10% surcharge on all orders. I wish restaurants would just add this hidden charge to the item price and stop being deceiving. Yes, they list the charge on the first page of their menu, but that doesn’t excuse them from lying on the price of the dishes prominently displayed on every page after that point.

I’ve seen some restaurants do it for more like a 3% charge, which is annoying but not overly egregious. But 10%? That’s a significant discrepancy from the posted price. This is a big pet peeve and a disrespectful practice.

Recommendation: No

I am incredibly close to saying that you could consider coming here to Z & Y if you strictly order just a few things on the menu (Peking Duck, duck webs, miso sea bass, and possibly the clams). Those are the restaurant’s best dishes and we would be open to eating them again. Collectively, they offered some good flavor and seemed to be made with care. The other dishes weren’t that interesting to us.

But the insistence on not reflecting the proper price of each item on the menu pushed the recommendation to a no. And the service here, along with inconsistencies between the website information and what they told us in person, pushes the score down too.

Perhaps the next time we are in town, we’ll try out the other Z & Y restaurant down the block. That one at least seems to have a Michelin bib gourmand designation.

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