Lulu Modern Chinese Brings New York Nerve and Flaming Peking Duck to Plano
Chinese food in the suburbs has long been asked to behave. Keep the prices sensible. Keep the lighting bright. Don’t make too much of yourself. At Lulu Modern Chinese, now open at West Plano Village, Sunny Chang is done with all of that. He wants to show that Chinese food can be elegant, expressive, and fully comfortable taking up space. In Plano, in 2026, that still qualifies as a mildly radical position.
Chang is a New Yorker by formation, which helps explain the nerve. After eight and a half years in the Marine Corps, he spent the next decade building a restaurant career in New York, including time with Tao Group, before opening Mizu in Denver. Lulu is the most personal project of the lot, built around a familiar tension: one world at home, another outside, and the eventual realization that the most interesting version of yourself exists somewhere in between. The restaurant’s muse, Lulu, appears throughout the murals, shifting between traditional Chinese opera dress and modern fashion. It is a clearer expression of the idea than most restaurants manage in words.
The space runs roughly 4,300 square feet and occupies the former Royale Burgers location at 3310 Dallas Parkway, though you would not know it now. The room has been fully reset, with low lighting, a central bar, and just enough music to give the space energy without overwhelming the table. This is not a special-occasion restaurant pretending to be casual. It is a place designed to be returned to.
The kitchen follows through. Lulu’s Flaming Peking Duck is the menu’s centerpiece, presented with full tableside theatrics. The duck arrives flamed and carved in front of you, served with pancakes and condiments, with optional follow-up courses that reward anyone paying attention. The spectacle is real, but it does not outrun the cooking.
Elsewhere, the menu moves with confidence. Soup dumplings come in pork, crab-and-pork, and wagyu versions, all made in-house. Familiar formats are nudged forward with small but deliberate adjustments. Black truffle appears where you might not expect it. Sauces run deeper, more layered. Duck-battered fries and chili-garlic pork belly sit alongside wok-fired wagyu and short ribs. Vegetable dishes, from lotus root to eggplant to Chinese broccoli, are treated as essential rather than optional, the way they are at a real table.
The bar reinforces the point. Boutique sake, a considered wine list, and a cocktail program that favors polish over gimmick give the room another reason to linger. Happy hour runs from 4 to 6 p.m. daily, with $10 cocktails and $5 beers, a small but telling signal that this is not only a place for anniversaries and corporate dinners.
What makes Lulu matter in Plano is not just the duck, or the dumplings, or the room. It is the sense that Chinese food here is being allowed to stretch a little, to be glamorous without becoming silly, and modern without flattening what made it worth caring about in the first place. That is a more persuasive case than most restaurants manage to make.