Wok Box

Honestly I was rather hesitant when I first received the invitation to check out Wok Box. Asian stirfry fast food usually isn’t all that authentic, but the idea of having so many options at one location definitely intrigued me. They serve stirfry noodles, rice boxes, appies (think samosas and spring rolls), naan-wich (Indian wraps), and soups.

So one day after work Mr. and I went to its South Surrey store. It’s pretty well decorated, has a modern look with TV showing the sports channel. It has an open kitchen so you can see the wok and watch as they make your food to order.

Food

After spending 10 minutes studying the menu, I chose the Hong Kong Curry, which is on the summer special menu. Original from HK, I can tell you that such dish doesn’t exist there, but the curry flavour does. It uses the thick noodle like the Shanghai-style stirfry noodle. The sauce was spicy, with lots of veggies (and some were HUGE – look at that piece of red pepper sitting on top of my box below – they need better control on prepping the ingredients) and several decent sized shrimps. The sauce was in the proper consistency, and not runny, which was good.

Mr. ordered the Chicken Pad Thai, and he was rather disappointed by it. There wasn’t much flavour to it and it didn’t have the tangy seasoning that it promised. I took a couple of bites and I too wasn’t too impressed by it. The noodles were overcooked, thus kind of soggy. We’ve definitely had much better ones at various Thai restaurants. Or even at a different quick service chain.

Overall the flavours were rather one-dimensional and missing the umpf. Presentation wise they look quite like it, but the flavours just aren’t there yet.

Service

Because we ordered the dishes to go, we were given those Chinese take-out boxes which were so cute. Mr. said he sees these boxes often but seriously, this is probably the 2nd time I’ve ever seen the Chinese take-out boxes being used at a restaurant. They have two sizes of boxes, one for lunch service and one for dinner. The dinner size is a pretty decent portion.

An even better part was that the take-out came with fortune cookies. It’s been ages since I had one. It’s satisfying to have one at the end of the meal.

Final Thoughts

I think Wok Box is a hit and miss. In my opinion, they serve Asian-inspired stirfrys that caters to the mainstream market (which is proven by its current clientele as we looked around the store). I also think its menu is too aggressive since it serves basically any type of Asian cuisines from Chinese to Thai to Indian to Japanese to Vietnamese to Singaporean, you name it. It could be more successful if the menu is more focused and they just master a few dishes. What matters more is the quality, not quantity.

Wok Box (South Surrey)
#10 – 2285 160th Street, Surrey
778-294-0808
www.wokbox.ca