From the Yangtze to KOP: Inside Peter Chang’s New Restaurant
The man who has cooked for presidents is now serving up all your Chinese food fantasies in the Philly ’burbs.
Photograph courtesy of Peter Chang KOP
Imagine for a minute the perfect neighborhood Chinese restaurant. The one you dream about. The one that was down the street from your first home away from home; the place on the corner when you and your friends were young and broke and living crammed together in a small apartment.
Now imagine the food. The broad menu, full of all the things you know you love and a hundred other things you’ve never tried. Small plates and big ones. Bamboo steamer baskets sweating onto the tabletops. Dishes you fondly remember now brought back to you, like vague memories made whole again.
What kind of chef would be in that kitchen? Someone mysterious, with a history like something out of a spy novel; who’d cooked for kings and presidents and traveled to far-flung places.
Peter Chang in King of Prussia is that dream restaurant. Chang is that chef. He worked on cruise ships on the Yangtze, in luxury hotels and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., then disappeared, surfacing occasionally in out-of-the-way Chinese restaurants in Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee. He got famous for being evasive, and for being a very good cook. He opened a dozen-odd restaurants, appeared on TV, was a finalist for the James Beard Awards in 2016. Then a few months ago, he opened in King of Prussia (with a second, larger restaurant in Colmar), tucked into a strip mall among dentist’s offices and yoga studios.
If you go, order the lion head meatballs, so light they practically float in their puddle of rich, sesame-scented brown gravy. Order the wontons soaked in chili oil and the soup dumplings, too. They are what every other soup dumpling is trying (and failing) to be. Small, sagging with broth, they are soft, rich and slick with pork fat.
If you go, order the crystal dumplings with their transparent skins and big chunks of shrimp. Order the massive scallion pancake because it is as big as a balloon, puffed in the deep fryer, and deflates when you tear into it, pulling off shreds to drag through the Singapore curry sauce from your vermicelli or the chili and sesame oil dressing from the fried tofu skin that makes your lips taste like cardamom and anise for the rest of the afternoon.
If you go, order the things you loved when you were a kid, before you cared about origin or authenticity. Order the bang bang shrimp or the kong pao chicken or the salt-and-pepper shrimp. Drink ice-cold Cokes and eat hot pot, or whole fish loaded up with so much Sichuan peppercorn your face goes numb. Order enough small plates to make the table wobbly.
Eat it all, then order more.
3 Stars — Come from anywhere in Philly
Rating Key
0 stars: stay far away
★: come if there are no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America
Published as “From the Yangtze to KOP” in the July 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
