Wagamama Chicken Firecracker

Wagamama chicken firecracker costs £16.70 and carries 1239 kcal, and it is the plate people order when they want the kitchen to take them seriously. Chicken wok fried with mangetout, peppers, onion and hot red chillies, finished with sesame seeds and shichimi over white rice, officially filed by wagamama under bold and fiery, which for once is honest menu language.

The heat is genuine and it is not the whole story. Firecracker sauce runs sweet underneath the fire, sticky enough to lacquer the chicken, and that sugar is what makes the plate moreish instead of punishing: the burn arrives, the sweetness calms it, and the fork goes back in. The shichimi seven spice dusting adds a citrus edge over the top. It is the sort of dish that empties a drink without anyone noticing.

The sweetness has a cost worth naming. The chicken firecracker carries around 35 g of sugar, the highest on the curries page, and a salt figure that earns respect. Against that, the protein at around 44 g is the best in the section, and it carries a gluten free marking, which hot dishes at chains rarely manage. The price is published, no estimate involved.

The plate rewards a particular kind of eater: someone who paces it. Taken fast, the heat compounds and flattens the flavour by the halfway mark; taken with rice in every forkful and the pickled counterpoints doing their work, the sweetness and the shichimi citrus stay legible to the end. The whole dried chillies are set dressing with consequences, there to scent the oil in the wok, and biting one is a rite of passage nobody repeats on purpose.

Anyone asking how much is the chicken firecracker gets a clean answer: £16.70 standard, a little more in London and at airports. Between the two proteins above it in heat terms sits nothing except the buldak range. Cool the table with a side of katsu pickles, and take the peach iced tea over water; sweetness fights capsaicin far better than dilution does.