Shophouse - Dupont Circle

Shophouse is essentially Asian Chipotle, and I mean that literally (it is owned by the same company). It follows the same assembly line process as Chipotle, primarily slinging rice bowls, but also serving "banh mi" sandwiches as well. You can pick one out of four different proteins (chicken "satay," pork and chicken meatballs, grilled steak, and tofu); one out of four different carbs (jasmine rice, brown rice, rice noodles, or the banh mi); one veggie; one sauce; one garnish; and one topping (the banh mi restricts to you to only the green papaya slaw garnish and the crushed peanuts topping). While I normally avoid "Asian" restaurants that serve food that require me to make copious use of scare quotes in order to describe them (like just now in this paragraph), I suppose I can cautiously recommend Shophouse.

Now, my primary concern with this concept is whether all these different ingredients will taste good regardless of the combination chosen by the customer. Otherwise, you are going to end up with a "Slophouse" of discordant flavors swimming in your paper bowl. Luckily, at least, my selection of brown rice, meatballs, red curry, long beans, pickled vegetables (almost a kimchi like concoction), and crispy garlic worked reasonably well together. The red curry was just beneath the threshold of my heat tolerance and the pickled vegetables added quite a bit of kick as well. The long beans were also crisp and flavorful. Surprisingly, the meatballs were the least exciting part of the bowl, though they were still good. My friend ordered green curry with chicken and long beans and also enjoyed it (the green curry sauce, while milder, is still hot---my friend couldn't even finish his bowl).

But, on the other hand, there were some things I noticed that gave me pause. For example, the rice noodles were pre-boiled. I wouldn't claim to be an expert on "Asian" food, but I would assume that it is just about axiomatic among all cuisines, both oriental and occidental, that noodles and pasta should be prepared a la minute; otherwise they become a gummy, unappetizing mess. For some reason, I would assume that Shophouse has yet to discover a way to overcome the primordial laws of physics, so I would avoid the noodles. And, while I enjoy spice, I think it is inevitable that they will tone down the sauce eventually. While, with respect to a Thai palate, the spice is probably normal and authentic (I've had curries and papaya salads that were as spicy as this), there is no way that a mass-market chain restaurant will be able to get most middle class Americans to eat this regularly for lunch. It is just too spicy for the American palate. But, I can also see Shophouse retreating too far the other way and serving the same creamily confected unctuous sludge that one can find at any strip mall Thai restaurant in the lower 48. I truly hope that they try to make the sauces more approachable, but still retain significant heat.

For $7.50, I suppose you could do worse. And how many times can you eat Chipotle anyway?

Cafe Asia - Rosslyn 1/28/2011

Cafe Asia
1550 Wilson Blvd., Ste. 1
Arlington, VA 22209

Cafe Asia is a "fusion" restaurant...the type of place now ensconced in the better strip malls across the American heartland. As a rule, I generally avoid "fusion" restaurants for the simple reason that I don't fully understand the appeal of being able to order candied Pad Thai with a side of California rolls squirted with syrupy teriyaki sauce on top. But, as it so happens, I was meeting some people after work and since this restaurant is conveniently located in the hive-like catacomb of office buildings in Rosslyn, we all decided to come here.

The interior is of a minimalist design, de rigueur for this type of establishment. The walls are primarily glass, the open-air kitchen is composed of burnished stainless steel, the furnishings are made of blonde laminate, and the place is otherwise unadorned with ornament (the gigantic projection screen broadcasting a basketball game being the one notable and garish exception). The color palette of the interior is, much like the food, whitewashed. All we would need to complete this archetypal design scheme is a gigantic Buddha statue, a rock garden, and some bonsai trees surrounding a little electric-powered fountain with a cutesy spout.

The clientele is to be expected: young urban office drones wearing their Friday night best, sipping on industrial pinot grigio and gamefully spearing pieces of gamy spicy tuna roll on their chopsticks. Luckily, since it was a Friday, they kept their yoga mats at home, though every table had a Blackberry, Droid, or Iphone sitting next to the bottle of soy sauce and packages of Nutrasweet.

The cuisine was as I expected. I ordered a beef rendang, which the menu characterized as an Indonesian curry. I have had this type of curry before in Malaysian restaurants, and it is an interesting cross between Indian and Thai style curries: it contains the earthiness, weight, and deep color of an Indian curry while also having the creaminess and some of the brightness of a Thai curry. The sauce in this dish was actually pleasant and piquant; unfortunately the beef was not properly braised and thus insufferably stringy. After eating this dish, I can now safely report to any medical journal two surefire ways to contract lockjaw: stepping on a rusty nail and masticating the beef in this rendang.

I had a taste of my friends' dishes as well. One ordered the Lemongrass Chicken, which was fine. It was made out of boneless, skinless chicken thighs (vastly superior in flavor to chicken breast). It had a nice char, was moist, and surprisingly tasted like chicken (though I didn't taste any lemongrass). Nothing you couldn't get anywhere else.

My friend had Shrimp Pad Thai. It was bland and limp, which is actually a vast improvement to most other pad thai I have eaten because at the very least it wasn't saccharine and cloying.

Then there was fried rice. It looked fine. At least it looked like it wasn't prefabricated in a factory and reheated in a wok.

All in all, the one reason you would come to this place is that it is convenient and there is so-so people watching, if pasty-faced Rosslyn office workers tanned by fluorescent lamps are your thing.