ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen
American restaurant chain specializing in Southeast Asian cuisine
ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen, or simply ShopHouse, was an American restaurant chain specializing in Southeast Asian cuisine. Its name derived from the shophouse, a common building type in urban Southeast Asia. The first ShopHouse opened in September 2011 in Washington, D.C. As of April 2016, there were a total of fourteen ShopHouse locations, in California, Chicago, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. ShopHouse was owned and operated by Chipotle Mexican Grill, and used a similar serving format.
Like Chipotle, ShopHouse restaurants were company-owned, rather than franchised. Its competitors included Panda Express, P. F. Chang's, Pick Up Stix, and to a small extent Noodles & Company. On October 25, 2016, founder, Steve Ells, said during an earnings call that the company "decided not to invest further in growing the ShopHouse brand." All ShopHouse locations were closed on March 17, 2017. After the restaurants closed, the leases for each restaurant were purchased by Gosh Enterprises and converted into new locations for Bibibop Asian Grill.
Concept development
The ShopHouse concept was primarily developed by Chipotle's director of concept development Tim Wildin, who was born in Bangkok and spent all of his childhood summers there. Wildin had been working in the marketing department at Chipotle and realized that if he could follow Chipotle's business model and combine it with his knowledge of traditional Southeast Asian cuisine, he could bring the taste of his homeland to the American masses. Culinary manager Nate Appleman was responsible for developing some recipes and the procedures to produce the final product.
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This entry incorporates text from “ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.