Wok O Taco in St. Louis County fuses Mexican and Chinese cuisines

Wok O Taco opened December 6 at 10633 Page, an unincorporated stretch of St. Louis County between Overland and Maryland Heights. (Prior to that, the address was home to Spice of India, Peshwa, and Gokul.) The restaurant serves Mexican cuisine and American-style Chinese dishes, along with a number of options boldly crossing elements of the two cuisines.

The restaurant is owned by Bianca Pacheco, her sister-in-law Brenda, and their husbands, Abel and Marcos Cervantes. The Cervantes brothers run the kitchen, while Bianca and Brenda handle front-of-house duties.

“Abel’s fear was cooking the Mexican food,” Bianca says of her husband, “which is weird, because he is Mexican.” Abel and Marcos were indeed born in Mexico, in the west-central state of Michoacán, but they‘ve spent most of their careers working in Chinese kitchens. Soon after moving to St. Louis as teenagers, in 2001 (when Abel was 17 and Marcos was 15), Abel started working in Chinese restaurants. Marcos later followed in his brother’s footsteps.

Wok O Taco has been a year in the making, but the seed of the idea came from a conversation that Bianca and Abel had while at a Chinese buffet restaurant. “He was eating and saying ‘Something’s missing,’ says Bianca. “I was like ‘Right, hot sauce or something?’ And he said ‘No, tortillas!’ I said, ‘You're right,' because we eat tortillas all the time.”

Abel started experimenting at home—“fried rice with tortillas and hot sauce,” says Bianca—but it was Marcos who suggested getting serious about the concept and opening a restaurant.

The idea of crossing these cuisines is at least more than a century old. In the city of Mexicali, near the border of Mexico and California, hundreds of Chinese restaurants serve a fusion of Mexican and Chinese cuisines that continues to thrive, a legacy of Chinese people settling in the region because the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act denied them entry to the United States.

Wok O Taco isn’t exactly following the Mexicali tradition, but Abel and Marcos have made smart choices about how to introduce Mexican ingredients to Chinese dishes and vice versa. The fried rice dishes ($6.99–$10.99) work well, offering such Mexican meat options as al pastor, chorizo, and carne asada. The chorizo fried rice (pictured above) makes you regret there aren’t more places combining styles like this; it’s simple and delicious.

The menu also caters to customers who want to order one or two conventionally Mexican or Chinese dishes. The “From the Wok” section of the menu features American-Chinese favorites, such as beef and broccoli, orange chicken, and sweet and sour chicken. You can order the dishes with fried rice or Mexican rice.

On the Mexican side of the menu, you can order tacos, burritos, and quesadillas with traditional Mexican meat preparations, such as asada, al pastor, tinga, and chorizo, but there’s also a chicken teriyaki option (pictured above and right). The tacos are served on corn tortillas and topped with various fresh ingredients, depending on which option you choose. A squeeze of lime brings out additional flavor. Be sure to ask for the chipotle mayo sauce on your taco.

The chipotle chicken noodles ($12.99) are perhaps the most surprising dish. A tangle of thick noodles, carrots, peppers, onion, and chunks of chicken is served in a chipotle and coconut sauce. The combination is reminiscent of a Thai or Malaysian dish.

The carne asada fries ($8.99)—topped with cheese, sour cream, scallions, jalapeños, bacon bits, and avocado slices—are worth mentioning for both their popularity and heft: sharing is suggested.

For dessert, the wonton empanadas ($5.99) are filled with a slightly savory Mexican vanilla cream cheese and served with whipped cream and sliced strawberries. And on the weekends, Wok O Taco also serves menudo, a beef tripe stew that Bianca says many Mexicans swear by as a hangover cure.