Kung Fu Plaza

If you've ever eaten in a restaurant in China Town Plaza, you know how much of the clientele is Asian natives. That's always kind of comforting, because it conveys a feeling of authenticity, a validation that the people who are running the place know what they're doing.

Kung Fu Plaza is in China Town Plaza (or at least adjacent to it, facing Valley View Boulevard), and on the evening of our visit, there were a lot of regulars, a whole lot of whom weren't Asian natives. But if that raises questions of quality, consider this: It opened, downtown, in 1973.

I can't even imagine a Thai restaurant in Las Vegas in 1973. Actually, I can't imagine a Thai restaurant in most parts of the country in 1973. Thai food didn't become familiar to most Americans until around the late '80s, and even later in some areas (and still not, in some).

But that's when Kung Fu Plaza was opened, by Thai immigrants, which explains the large component of more-familiar Chinese dishes on its menu -- a component that was even larger in the '70s, according to the restaurant's website. It also explains the name (remember the kung fu frenzy of the early '70s?) and the clientele. A restaurant in business in Las Vegas for 37 years is practically a landmark, and it clearly built the loyalty of locals along the way.

These days, the owners seem to have pretty much returned to their roots, while keeping a lot of Chinese dishes for the loyal. And their pad Thai is among the best in town.

Pad Thai is often called the national dish of Thailand, and it's practically a requirement in Thai restaurants. A dish of stir-fried rice noodles, it has as many variations as there are Thai cooks, with some dry, others almost creamy. This pad Thai ($8.50 for beef, which we had, or $7.75 for chicken, and on up for various seafood versions) was crunchy. It had lots of slices of tender beef and the requisite sauce of eggs and fish sauce and garlic and chile, but mixed in with the noodles was an almost equal amount of bean sprouts, plus quite a few scallion batons. It added up to a nice bit of crunch, providing textural contrasts that were both appealing and unexpected.

Tom Kha Chicken ($9.25) was the classic soup, served in a battered aluminum hot pot with flames shooting out of the chimney, which as you can imagine kept the soup nice and bubbly hot. We had asked for it fairly mild, but it still had a good bit of kick. It also had a good bit of flavor, in large part because dark-meat chicken was used instead of the more commonly found chicken breast, and the flavor of galangal was clearly present.

On the Chinese side, we were intrigued by the Hon Sui Tofu ($9.25), which turned out to be much less successful than the Thai dishes. It sounded good -- fried tofu with barbecued pork and chicken -- and we could've lived with the fact that the pork and chicken were finely minced, since the flavor of the pork, particularly, came through quite strongly. But the tofu cubes were soggy in the extreme and the "sesame-oyster sauce" was without much discernible flavor.

Service throughout was mostly fine, although things got a little crazy when the tour-bus group arrived, which always seems to be a hazard in China Town.

A lot has happened in Las Vegas since 1973, with the city growing exponentially and diversifying greatly. Echoes of the past are still present at Kung Fu Plaza, but it's to the restaurant's credit that it has changed with the times.

Las Vegas Review-Journal restaurant reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at 383-0474 or e-mail her at hrinella@ reviewjournal.com.