Chipotle’s ShopHouse Experiment Starts in DC

Oct 8, 2011 by contributors, Carlos Izurieta and Sarah Michaud

Chipotle has a sibling in town, the new ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen, which debuted in Dupont Circle in September. Shophouse offers quick, healthy, customizable Southeast Asian theme meals. The ordering experience is very similar to Chipotle in which you can choose a food style: a lunch bowl or a báhn mì sandwich. For the lunch bowl, you start by picking a starchy base and from there you choose a protein, vegetable, sauce, garnish, and topping. For the báhn mì sandwich, you pick a protein. We both love spicy food and Chipotle, so after a few lunches, we believe we can give a fairly accurate review of their food.

Sarah’s first rice bowl consisted of jasmine rice, grilled chicken satay, Chinese broccoli and spicy red curry sauce garnished with green papaya salad: “The first thing I noticed was the awesome heat from the red curry sauce. Hurray! Underwhelming spicy food is infuriating. However, I was not thrilled with the chicken satay. While there were a few tasty bits of charred chicken, many of the chunks were dominated by gristle and fat. The Chinese broccoli was crisp, tender, and spicy. I think the green papaya salad would have been great as a side dish instead of piled on top of everything else. The salad dressing gave part of my meal an odd vinegary taste.”

During her second visit, she ordered a bowl with tofu, long beans, and the spicy curry sauce with chopped peanuts and herb salad: “The crumbled tofu was outstanding! The texture was just right—firm, but not grainy and the turmeric-based spices gave it a nice kick. The long beans were grilled, which gave them more flavor than I was expecting. Topped with herbs and chopped peanuts instead of the papaya salad, this bowl lacked the weird vinegar taste that tainted my last bowl. It was seriously good!”

Carlos ordered the báhn mì sandwich with slight trepidation: “I have had the sandwich several times before at family-run Vietnamese restaurants and was wary of how ShopHouse might have westernized the báhn mì to appease the mainstream American pallet. Overall, I was pleased with the taste of it. I ordered the sandwich with grilled steak and it came with green papaya slaw, crushed peanuts, and what they were calling an ‘herb salad.’ The herb salad was more like tiny pieces of herb leaves, not sure if that qualifies as a salad. One thing that I wish they would do more is to promote their vegetable items as separate side dishes. I requested a side of spicy charred corn that was delicious and had a nice kick to it.”

For the amount of food you get, we feel that $8.00 is a bit much for a báhn mì sandwich, seeing you can get one at a mom-and-pop Vietnamese restaurant for $4 to $5. But when those restaurants are priced out of the neighborhood by large chains, what other choice do you have? Overall, ShopHouse is pretty good when you want something simple, asian and spicy.

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