Chang's Hot Wok heats things up in Carol Stream
The opening of Chang's Hot Wok in Carol Stream came as good news to those who lamented the closing of Peter Chang's Hot Wok Village, co-owned with his late brother in Schaumburg.
Serving the same Chinese Indian mix, Chang's bills itself as a purveyor of Bombay-style Chinese cuisine — a technique and culinary practice that involves wok cooking with Indian ingredients and spices. But the menu reveals a broader approach, one that also includes Thai and Manchurian elements.
The restaurant is set in a deep, relatively narrow room espousing the pared down largesse of a former buffet space with cement floors and an oversized chandelier in the center. Seating is at several Lazy Susan-equipped, family-style dining tables, surrounded by rows of booths along the windows and lots of other tables sprinkled about.
An aquarium of plump and humorously rowdy Koi fish mark where the entrance ends and the dining room begins. If you get to witness feeding time, you'll be in for a chuckle.
To start, appetizers included pakoras, dumplings and even chicken wings. The items we tried were effortlessly delicious, even if they didn't show an overwhelming allegiance to any one region or country. We liked both the garlic tofu — spicy cubes of bean curd whose crispy exterior put up little fight before melting on the tongue — and the super tender, egg-washed fried spring chicken specked with green herbs and served with a kicking garlic and parsley sauce.
A tum yum soup was brothy and tomatoey, with bopping mushrooms and small bits of shredded chicken that sank to the bottom after every twirl of the spoon.
Vegetarian and “more vegetarian” sections of the menu outlined what is a must in every Indian restaurant, in this instance showing a variety of house sauces, like extra hot spicy Hunan or a sweet and sour, poured over anything from paneer (Indian cheese curd) and lady finger (okra) to Thai curry vegetables.
The rest of the menu was divided into shrimp, fish, chicken and beef. On the recommendation of our server, we picked the dry Manchurian beef: soft, sweetly hot bits of fried beef under a sprinkle of green onion.
We then moved on to a gravy-rich sweet garlic chicken, which, with its saturating, blood orange color. could be easily mistaken for a sweet and sour dish. Once you bit into the carrot-shaped pieces of chicken, however, the fragrant tones of ginger and sweetness took over. Ginger too showed up in the always-dependable combination of shrimp, beef and chicken — here mixed in fried rice that sported a flavorful reddish tint.
Dessert is wholly taken up by ice cream, but you may not even need it, especially if you're still making your way through a bottle of hot sake.
Chang's Hot Wok
802 West Army Trail Road, Carol Stream, (630) 830-6868, changshotwok.com
<b>Cuisine: </b>Chinese-Indian
<b>Setting: </b>Former buffet space with red walls, bare floors and a family-friendly feel
<b>Hours:</b> 5 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 5 to 11 p.m. Friday, noon to 11 p.m. Saturday and noon to 10 p.m. Sunday. Lunch also served 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.
<b>Entrees: </b>$9.25-$15.50