Chai Wok: Fifteen Years of Not Changing the Sesame Chicken

A wok in a kosher kitchen works under rules the cuisine never anticipated. No pork, no shellfish, no butter to finish a sauce, no cream anywhere near the dessert freezer. What Chai Wok does with those rules, on a low commercial block of NE 164th Street a few minutes west of Biscayne Boulevard, is decline to treat them as a handicap. Donny Gordon, a Florida native who ran a pizza store before this, opened the restaurant in November 2010 and set himself three principles he still repeats: good service, consistent food, a clean room. Fifteen years on, the sesame chicken tastes the way it tasted last time. In this category that is the whole argument, and it is far harder to hold than a new dish is to invent.

The chicken section is the spine of the menu and it is priced flat: orange, sesame, honey garlic, General Tso's and Szechuan, all $25.95. Nothing is dressed up as the expensive one. Sesame chicken is the volume seller and the dish to judge the kitchen by, because a fryer run properly puts out a coating that stays crisp under the glaze for the length of a meal, and a fryer run badly gives you the same plate gone soft in four minutes. Crispy beef and Mongolian beef sit just above at $27.95. Spare ribs, at $45, are the outlier and the platter a table orders together.