First Taste: Cheap and Delicious Asian Fare at Secret Recipe

I’ve been dying to visit Secret Recipe for ages! It’s just so far out of my way, I needed to make a day of it just to be in North Dallas. Secret Recipe is a small Asian restaurant with an overwhelming menu ranging from your typical Americanized Asian fare (if you want to be safe) to authentic Malyasian, Thai, Chinese, and Indo-Pak foods. The majority of diners were Asian, so I’d have to say Secret Recipe has that stamp of approval.

“You know it’s good when Asians eat here.” – foodie friend.

The restaurant is small, but welcoming. It’s not a dingy or dirty place either. Seriously, that menu is a beast and fortunately comes with tons of pictures. My foodie friend and I had trouble making decisions. We realized, there’s just no way the two of us have enough room in our tummies to make a dent in to this menu. So we called upon the help of friends and the servers to give suggestions.

To start, we ordered the Chicken Curry Puffs. These fat little things came two per order and were stuffed with curried chicken, egg and potato. Definitely more potato than anything, but I love the carbs. Overstuffed anything with potato, you got me!

Chicken Curry Puffs

Next was the roti with a cup of chicken curry. Lots of flavor and has a kick to it.  Really enjoyed this dish.

Roti with Chicken Curry

This dish came highly recommended from my friends. It’s comfort food. The crispy chicken comes with a house special chili sauce and helped balance everything we ordered. With rice and the other entrees, this was a good choice. Skin was crispy (as it should be) and the meat was tender, not overcooked.

Crispy Chicken

One of my favorite Chinese dishes is Mapotofu. It’s cubed tofu stir fried withs minced pork and chili. This stuff and sauce over rice….ugh drools. Wasn’t very spicy, but I prefer it that way.

Mapotofu!!!

Here is our sad attempt at including “greens” into the meal. It’s all stir fried, so “healthy” was not gonna happen. Regardless, this was an awesome dish. Good flavor and I even repurposed the leftovers for breakfast egg muffins for the week. The chili sauce in the dish really made it yummy.

Okra, Eggplant, String Bean Sambal

Gosh, overall. This was a really yummy foodie trip and I can’t wait to go back. After we ate, we found out there is a second location in Plano off Coit that opened a month ago. Ugh…could’ve saved us the long drive. Glad to know there’s a closer-ish location. I’ll definitely be back.

All five dishes racked up a whopping bill of $35. You seriously can’t beat that. That’s a family style dinner right there and there was enough leftovers to feed my hangery self later on. Good food, good prices. Definitely like it here and will be back to tackle that ginormous menu.