WZ Bistro has two locations and for this first-bite review I ventured to the Miller Valley Road location with its very tight driveway and sufficient parking lot on a rainy Friday evening just before peak dinner hour.
With a huge menu and a couple creative dishes, it’s easy to be satisfied with WZ’s selection as a catch-all “Asian” bistro. Some of the wait staff speak a southern dialect of Chinese and the flavors in the food also reflect southern, coastal, and island-Chinese tastes—that is, a little sweet, and not spicy …almost at all. For the heat-sensitive diner, the dishes we tried would not be off limits here, even the one that was listed with a spicy pepper icon next to it; don’t tell Sichuan province.
WZ offers a familiar and extensive list of Americanized ‘Japanese,’ ‘Thai,’ ‘Korean,’ and ‘Chinese’ dishes in a sit-down restaurant including a small bar and a selection of bottled beers. I appreciate that there is at least one unfiltered sake available alongside a modest filtered selection. Despite its lack of heat, every dish was full of flavor, with a few even revealing some depth beyond what you’d expect from your standard American-Asian fare in this desert-state small town.
“Asian” as a monolithic food concept of course does not actually exist in Asia, but it does inside our variety-is-the-spice-of-life American minds, and WZ Bistro has done the hard work of offering a representative variety of familiar “Asian” dishes heavily tailored for the American palate, while still having just a little bit of fun.
What WZ is doing best is cooking and seasoning meat well, and using fresh, non-frozen, well-selected vegetables, which means they serve up satisfying and nourishing dishes. Where they need most help is their rice, which is dry and loose, but I suspect most of us don’t go here just to graze on their grains, and nor should we.
The lettuce wraps are served with half a head of iceberg lettuce. For a kitchen in a smaller desert town (“but we’re not in the desert!” I can hear you protesting, dear ponderosa pine Prescottonian), it’s hard to stock and use the more tender-leaf lettuces predictably enough to justify the extra expense; the iceberg was crisp and green and worked. The sauce was sweet and tart in a way that reminded me of khmer cuisine, and there were chopped fresh bell peppers and asparagus. I would order this again.
Their unexpected appetizer of yellowtail, jalapeño, yuzu-soy, and black tobiko (a more familiar looking caviar than orange tobiko, but not terribly common to find out here) was a creative offering amidst the standard gyoza and edamame list of appetizers. This lightly creative dish with its well-balanced flavors is something I would expect to find at a sushi bar perhaps in Montecito—a very pleasant surprise here. I would order it again.
Although the hot and sour soup was disappointingly neither hot nor sour, it was anyway so sumptuously full of multiple kinds of freshly cooked mushrooms that I would rather call it an Asian mushroom stew and order it over and over again. If you want it either hot or sour, you’ll need to order it to-go and add some white vinegar and white pepper to get that classic hot-and-sour flavor. If you’re feeling like a forest forager who needs hearty mushroom infusions, then get you some of this.
The lemongrass coconut soup seemed to be without any actual lemongrass. It has a largely unseasoned coconut broth, moist chicken, and newly picked asparagus and mushrooms. A great high-calorie keto dish to break up your meal-prep routines while getting aminos and vitamins. I might order this again.
The Szechuan Pepper chicken, I am sorry to tell you, is not Szechuan at all (sichuan 四川), so for any other fanatical foodies hiding out here that were looking for some authentic huajiao, mala flavor: you are not going to find it here. But, you will find some pleasing depth to this dish, including sweet, sour, tangy, and the tiniest, adorable-est bit of “heat” enveloping the chewy crunchy batter and moist chicken. Fear not, you won’t find dried out, unchewable chicken shreds that often are hidden in “Asian” batters in small restaurants across the U.S.; instead you’ll find moist and flavorful chicken that you can trust with every bite, and we found that was the case for all the meat we tried.
The yakisoba with shrimp did not disappoint on another flavor-packed meat. The noodles were overdone and lacked the fried (“yaki“) texture found in the real deal on streets of Japan, but it tasted great. The dish looks un-enticing, and looking at it might make you remember all the bland, boring Americanized yakisobas you’ve had before, but don’t worry: this one is great. Verdant veggies on this dish, too. You feel like you’re eating real, nutritious food here, because you are.
Finally, a dish I won’t be ordering again—and likely not from the entire category of dishes—their Samurai Roll, described as crunchy and spicy, was neither crunchy nor spicy. They were too heavy-handed on the crabmeat “topping,” and the batter on the shrimp tempura inside the roll was an unappetizing brown. The rice was dry and loose. I swallowed it only because I had committed to chewing it in the first place. The best thing about it was the well cooked shrimp. Much better sushi rolls can be had at Fujiyama, although overall it’s a known challenge to find good sushi in Prescott.
Pleasant, simple service—an increasing rarity in our town—a well-stocked beer fridge (Shock Top goes so very well with “Asian” food, if you didn’t already know), and lively, flavorful food. WZ Bistro does without the obnoxious yelling and shouting common to restaurants serving this type of food and overall had a surprisingly low-noise ambiance despite the high open ceilings.
WZ is not serving up exacting ethnic dishes because its clientele loves American-Asian cuisine, and it is meeting that demand successfully. If you feel guilty for going to Panda Express because you’re hooked on Beijing Beef: you should; so stop, turn around, and go to WZ Bistro. Their Szechuan Pepper sauce, available for either chicken or beef, is what Panda Express wants to be, but cannot, because WZ does it with fresh, well-selected ingredients, and crafts a much, much better plate of food.
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