Recently remodeled, Nine Dragons is probably the easiest restaurant at Epcot to get in to without a reservation. That’s because to so many people Chinese food is not equated with fine dining — it’s something that comes in a cardboard container and you get it for takeout. This is different, more of an upscale Chinese dining experience.I popped in for a lunch and started with a bowl of chicken consomme with pork dumplings, a golden broth with a rich mouthfeel. It had two big dumplings of chewy dough filled with well-spiced ground pork.
For my entree I had the shrimp with spinach noodles, which looked very much like something you’d find served in the Italy pavilion. (But remember that Marco Polo is said to have introduced Italians to pasta after a voyage to China.) The noodles were fettuccinelike and were mixed with red and green sauteed bell peppers and dotted with flecks of hot pepper flakes and topped with cool, fesh coriander.
The shrimp had a thin film of crispiness and peppery spice.
For dessert there was a sponge cake with fruit filling that was slightly dry.

Additional location: Mall at Millenia, 4200 Conroy Road, Orlando; 407-345-2888. I don’t know why I included this restaurant under the Chinese listings – the food is about as far away from authentic Chinese as you can get. But, for some, this is what they want in a Chinese restaurant. And they can have it.Still, there are some tasty things to be had. For appetizers the salt & pepper shrimp were a treat. The shrimp, lightly breaded and coated with salt and pepper, are meant to be eaten shell, tail and all. It’s an unusual textural experience, but it’s one you should try. The “soothing lettuce wraps,” available with chicken or vegetables only, were good too. Here the meat or vegetables were stir-fried with a light sauce and served with whole leaves of iceberg lettuce. To eat, you simply spoon some of the food onto the lettuce and roll it up. Red sauced wontons featured shrimp and pork steamed inside rather doughy wonton skins. They were sticky and much less pleasant than the other appetizers. My favorite entree was Chang’s spicy chicken, a version of the popular General Tso’s chicken found in many Chinese restaurant. The chunks of chicken breast were lightly breaded and stir-fried with a sweet sauce made spicy with pepper flakes. The spicing was just right – it wasn’t too wimpy, and yet it didn’t obliterate the tastebuds.

The food here is Hong Kong style, which is a mix of Cantonese and Western, especially British because, you know, empire and all that. So is the food here authentic? Yes, it’s authentic Hong Kong style.

At Shanghai Lane it’s all about the soup dumplings. There are other things on the small menu of this quick-serve restaurant in west Orlando’s Chinatown mall at Westside Crossing, but it’s the soup dumplings that have fascinated most of the people who come here.

If you hear people call Taste of Chengdu the hottest restaurant in town, you should probably know that they may not be referring to its popularity, though popular it certainly is.

It’s also serving some of the hottest, as in spiciest, food you’re likely to find in Central Florida.

Taste of Chengdu, the Sichuan restaurant that opened in west Orlando two years ago and quickly established itself as arguably serving the best Chinese food in town, has opened a second location in Baldwin Park.

True to its namesake province, Taste of Chengdu features dishes that use Sichuan peppercornss, the boa constrictor of seasonings. Take a bite of something with the pepper, perhaps dan dan noodles with a chili oil sauce, and you at first feel a warm embrace of your tongue, then a tingling effect, just before the real heat comes in for the kill.

Tasty Wok recently moved across the street to a larger space. It has its fans; I’m not among them. The food is good enough on its own but it isn’t worth putting up with an indifferent and unwelcoming staff.

Entering Ten Ten Chinese Seafood & Grill, you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve wandered into a wedding banquet instead of a restaurant. All of the tables are big and round, seating eight, and are draped with gold-tinged fabrics. The chairs, too, are wrapped in the same fabric and tied with a bow at the back, the type of feature that would be a separate line item on a caterers checklist.

The initials in the name of Y.H. Seafood Clubhouse, a new restaurant in the Restaurant Row district, are easy to explain: They stand for Yummy House, a Florida Chinese restaurant group with a handful of locations.

The Clubhouse part isn’t quite as clear. For me, clubhouse evokes rustic, almost slapdash digs. But Y.H. Seafood Clubhouse borders on elegant, a bright and glittery room with walls of tall golden panels with delicate floral patterns and tables covered with crisp white cloths. (The space, in the Whole Foods plaza on the southeast corner of Sand Lake Road and Turkey Lake Road, was originally O’Charley.)

The Seafood part of the name speaks for itself. Although this is a Chinese restaurant, its menu focuses on the region of Canton and its coastline on the South China Sea.

The only full-service, sit-down restaurant inside Animal Kingdom, this is a true disappointment on all levels. The food is subpar and the service does not meet Disney’s usual standards. The restaurant is operated, as is Rainforest Cafe and T-Rex, by Landry Restaurants.OK, there was one food item I liked. It was a plate of green beans that had been coated in batter (the beans, not the plate) and fried and served with a sweet dipping sauce. A nice way to eat vegetables. But $6.99 for a stack of green beans? Are they kidding?No, they’re serious, otherwise they wouldn’t have charged $12.99 for the eensy dim sum basket that had a few pork pot stickers, pork and shrimp dumplings and two stale, doughy steamed buns with what looked to be about a teaspoon of barbecue inside.My guest chose the Shaoxing steak and shrimp entrée, which featured shrimp on skewers coated with something the menu described as tempura batter. Actually, it more closely resembled the substance that insulates a common corn dog at your basic county fair. The meat half of the duo was good, skirt steak saturated with soy marinade. The thin steak was wrapped around a timbale of jasmine rice. The plate also included a rather soggy medley of vegetables – snow peas, bell peppers, some mushrooms – but the whole thing didn’t come close to being worth the $22.99 fee.The theme song here could be “Yakkity Yak, Don’t Eat That!”