The Flame — Restaurant in Town of Haverstraw

The Flame has the best takeout Chinese food I've had in the area, but it's SO absurdly overpriced that most of the positives cancel out and I don't think I could justify coming back on my own dime. The office ordered lunch for us this past Wednesday (letting us choose the place) and since we knew it was more expensive from a prior website visit, this seemed like a convenient opportunity to give it a shot. The menu is predominantly the standard Chinese fare you'd expect, but as with many Kosher establishments, you also get some really random items too. All of us did a double-take when we saw churros in the dessert section, for instance, and morally felt we needed to order them as well. (There was also a dessert called "personal pie" that they were unfortunately out of - we were all very curious about that. Was it a fruit pie? A savory pie? A pizza pie? We may never know.)

I ordered my standard Sweet & Sour Chicken off the entrée/main menu - I wasn't interested in the sides that came with the cheaper (but not by much) combo platter. Again, the prices are mouthdropping. A lunch combo for this would have been $20. Yes, $20 for an item that you typically would get for less than $10. The actual entree/non-lunch version? $26. Blown away; literally 3 times higher than you'd get elsewhere. I have no idea how they justify that, but thankfully this was not my wallet taking the bruising. That said, it's definitely decent for what it is. Per the attached picture, they separate the chicken and the rice within the container, which I like. It's a messier dish with the sauce, so anything that makes the experience more organized, I'll sign up for. The sauce was a little watery for my taste, but was flavorful. The chicken was the star here - cooked perfectly and I didn't need to eat around chunks of just fried skin.

The churros...were interesting. They definitely are not dictionary-definition churros with the standard star tip and funnel action - it's just fried dough that's in a similar shape. It kind of looked like a Jersey Shore boardwalk funnel cake mistake or something. It came with a really odd non-dairy (of course) chocolate sauce that was honestly pretty terrible and tasted like substandard powdered milk. At first I thought this was an awful dish, but once I had a few bites of the naked Churros without that sauce, it definitely improved (and what red-blooded American can't get down with random pieces of fried dough,. regardless of shape?)

If someone else is paying, by all means give this a shot. But it's not that much better than other nearby options that are quite literally a fraction...

Expensive for what it is, even by kosher standards, which is saying something. I'd be able to deal with the prices if the food was good but it was pretty disappointing. Overcooked, tough chicken that was definitely not fresh and had lots of cartilage in it, when I cut it up for my kids it was gray and stringy inside. My kids couldn't eat most of it because they couldn't chew it. Really disappointed as we were excited to have a new kosher...

The atmosphere is better than most kosher restaurants but still just counter service. We got the general choy combo with fried rice. The rice was pretty boring with nothing in it and the GC was pretty average. The egg roll tasted a little fishy to me (it was supposed to be beef) but was perfectly crispy. Food was really hot when it...