As I continue my drive home from Florida, I have stopped over in DC for a day, which happens to be the test market for a new restaurant from the creators of Chipotle (i.e. McDonald’s). Since Chipotle is pretty much the best place in the world for fast casual burritos (sorry, Moe’s! Love ya!), I decided to check out the Asian version while I was in town.
Now I have to preface this by saying that I have never been a huge fan of Asian food. I wouldn’t even eat Chinese food until very recently, and many of their flavor profiles are disturbing to me. I won’t touch sushi. Thai food I like, except things that have peanuts or coconut in them (almost everything) and Vietnamese, well, I like pho, but only once in a while. I’ve never been a fan of sweet mixed with my savory, and you tend to see a lot of that in South Asian cooking, so I went in suspicious from the get go.
I suppose I should start with the basic details. The place is called Shophouse, which, according to Google, is a type of architectural building found in Southeast Asia, but is actually a terrible name for a restaurant, as it sounds like a bad HSN show or an antiques dealer. Name aside, it is located on Connecticut Avenue, just north of Dupont Circle, and when I arrived the line was out the door.
The basic setup is just like Chipotle, in that you see all the stuff laid out in front of you and you pick what you want them to put in your bowl (or sandwich). As I feared, most of the stuff was not food I was interested in consuming (papaya slaw? do I look like someone who would eat papaya slaw?), but I finally managed to choose some items for my bowl, with disastrous results.
First, I got to pick my type of rice or noodles, so I picked “jasmine rice” since it seemed the closest thing to normal rice there. Then I got to pick between Tofu (never in a million years), Chicken Satay (again, not a fan), Steak, or Meatballs. Ah, steak and meatballs. Now this was my kind of choice. I went with the meatballs, and as I had pretty much already known in advance, they were my favorite part of the meal.
Next up you got to choose a vegetable to put in, and the choices were between some sort of weird mushy broccoli type thing, eggplant (even my wife won’t eat eggplant, and she eats anything!), corn, or long beans. Corn did not seem very asian to me, so I went with the beans. Once the meat and vegetable were in there, you got to pick a sauce. Now let me be very clear about this. DO NOT PICK THE RED SAUCE!
The choices were a green curry, a red curry, and some sort of yellow vinaigrette, and I picked the red curry. Now, they warned me that it was “the spicy one,” but I like spicy things, and restaurants are always warning you about “the spicy one” and it is never that spicy. So I got the red curry. Again, I must tell you, unless you are actually from Southeast Asia, or perhaps are a fire eater, or maybe live on the sun, DO NOT PICK THE RED SAUCE!
Once that was finished I got to choose another gloop of something, either the aforementioned papaya slaw, or pickled carrots and friends. I almost didn’t get either, but in the end I got the pickled stuff. At the very end you can then get some peanuts, garlic, or crisped rice sprinkled on top, so I went with the rice, and then headed off to a table to test it out.
To refresh your memory, I now had a bowl full of rice, meatballs, beans, pickled carrots, lava, and rice crispies, which may not sound like a good combination, but I can’t see how it was any worse than any other possible combination (noodles, steak, corn, vinaigrette, papayas, and peanuts?), so I dug in.
It was…weird. Not horrible, but none of it seemed to go that well together. I liked the meatballs. Then I got about halfway through the bowl. That was when my eyes started watering and I began to sweat. How had I not noticed the spiciness earlier? Why had I eaten most of it? Why was my nose running? Was the room spinning? Should I walk towards the bright light, or away from it?
Man, that red sauce was spicy. So spicy that I couldn’t finish my food, and there really was not an overly big portion to begin with. If you are imagining that you will feel as full as you do after a Chipotle burrito, think again. Although it was hard to judge fullness after my stomach had completely melted away, I could still tell that I would be hungry again later, and indeed I was. So Shophouse is not a place for me, but if you like all of those things that I listed above, and would like to have them mixed into a bowl for you, go check out Shophouse and let me know how it was. I have a bunch of weird food issues anyway, so I’m probably not the best judge. And if you saw me write anything in all caps recently, take it seriously.
