Fantasy Restaurant brings authentic Chinese flavors to Petaluma

There’s much more than hot pots and barbecue at this East Washington spot|

Walking into Fantasy Restaurant for the first time feels like walking in to a dear friend’s home because the staff is so warm. Walk in a second time and you could be greeted with a hug, and the server may already know what you want to order because they remember every detail.

The menu is extensive with a large variety of unusual Chinese items, but the specialty is the hot pot. This is a kissing cousin of shabu-shabu, something you will find in certain specialty Japanese restaurants.

So what exactly is hot pot? You start off by choosing a flavorful broth base. There are several options, but we found the basic house original was the crowd pleaser. If you order the spicy, or even the half and half, be aware that even if you order it “mild,” it is still incendiary. On a scale of one-10 I would give it a 10. I cannot imagine what you’d get if you order it medium or hot.

The piping hot basin of soup broth is brought to your table, which has a special built-in heating element to keep the food cooking. Be aware too, that if you sit at a table for four, the protection from the hot element is a metal box under the table that is a real knee-knocker, so take care when sitting down at the table. Peak under the tablecloth to see what I mean before you pull up your chair.

The hot pot menu is presented sushi-bar style, where you mark what kinds of things you want in your pot of broth. You are charged per person for the broth, and per order for the items added in. For a party of eight we got two plates of the premium beef, a basket of baby bok choy, a basket of fresh shiitake mushrooms, a plate of 10 tiger shrimp (served in the shell) and a plate of pork and shrimp wontons. The cost for the hot pot alone was $67.70, which works out to $8.47 per person – a great value for so much food and entertainment. Although we found ourselves ordering a few more menu items to ensure everyone left full.

The server was careful to explain which items to add to the broth first (the wontons and the mushrooms), and how to cook the other items so that each item comes out right, but risk-takers are free to do what they wish. At the end of all the cooking, the broth is richly flavored by everything that has passed through it, making a soup so delicious that you’ll want to consume cup after cup

This is a very interactive meal, but not one I would do if we had small children at the table. One of the things I was impressed with was the wide variety of items there are to cook in the hot pot, including things one would never find in the other Chinese restaurants in Petaluma, making Fantasy a very authentic experience. Just a few examples would be the clay pot lamb belly with bean curd sheets and the shrimp swirl pops. On the catering menu they offer a whole roast pig and a whole roast suckling pig.

At this visit we rounded out our meal with an appetizer of green onion pancakes ($4.95), a whole roast Peking duck ($25.99), an order of roast pork (belly) with braised tofu ($13.99) in a clay pot, and three bowls of steamed rice. That made the meal very affordable for eight. The duck was one of the very best Chinese roast ducks any of us had tasted before, juicy and moist with a lacquered skin, served with a lovely housemade plum sauce.

On another visit we tried the Singapore noodles ($9.95), the fried calamari appetizer ($7.95) and the mixed deluxe vegetables ($5.50). The noodles and the vegetables were both delicious, but those noodles were our favorite dish of all the visits we made, an exemplar for all Chinese restaurants in Petaluma and beyond. It was loaded with mouth-watering pieces of their char siu (barbecued pork) and shrimp, and the curry seasoning was just right. The mixed vegetables were also outstanding, and my request for “no cornstarch” was politely and perfectly honored.

The only dish we really did not feel was worth the price was the calamari, which consisted of about six pieces of a very large calamari cut into rings and battered. While the batter was tasty, the portion size was really meager compared to the price and the calamari was not that tender. Considering the excellent value and high quality of everything else we ordered over several visits it made the contrast even more startling. I hope they will consider reworking or eliminating this dish.

Other smaller points of interest include that the beer and wine lists are brief; we would like to see more wines that are appropriate to the flavor profiles of Chinese food on the menu. A pot of oolong tea was $4, and side orders of steamed rice were $1 each. At the end of the meal, a refreshing plate of chilled orange wedges was delivered to our table.

The Hong Kong barbecue side of this restaurant has been well known since the first day it opened, and continues to draw a steady clientele. The reputation is well deserved, but now the menu is so much more than barbecue. They would do well to rebrand themselves and change their signage and online presence to reflect the broadening of their menu to include the most authentic Chinese food in the North Bay, food that is definitely on par with restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland.

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