Shophouse Visited 11/27/11 2 Forks

Shophouse 1516 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036

I usually don't review fast food places, but ShopHouse was something I had been wanting to try and it's a bit unique to the restaurant scene, so I just had to review it.  It's the Southeast Asian "spin-off" from the founders of Chipotle (say what you will about Chipotle but sometimes a good burrito bowl just really hits the spot) and the only location open is in Dupont Circle in DC. 

The set-up is the same as Chipotle.  You walk in and you choose your concept - so a rice (brown or jasmine) or noodle bowl or a banh mi.  Then you choose your protein (chicken satay, grilled steak, pork and chicken meatballs or organic tofu), vegetables (chinese broccoli, spicy corn, thai basil eggplant, or green beans), sauce (tamarind vinaigrette, green curry, or spicy red curry) and toppings (papaya salad, cilantro, pickles, toasted rice, peanuts, and crispy garlic).  My mom and I decided to get a brown rice bowl with corn and long beans and red curry, a noodle bowl with organic tofu, eggplant and long beans and a bahn mi with pork and chicken meatballs.  At first it didn't look like a lot of food but in true Chipotle style, the bowl itself was extremely filling and had to take half of it home.  My first impression of my noodle dish was that the tofu was very disappointing.  It was chopped up so fine and tiny that you could barely taste or see it.  Most Asian places use bigger pieces of tofu and marinate it to give it flavor.  If they hadn't told me this was tofu I would have never realized it and coming from an Asian who has had tons of tofu in every variety, that is a bad sign.  The noodles were pretty decent but the whole bowl just tasted exactly like what it was, a bunch of random Asian ingredients thrown together but with no cohesion or flavor profile.  The eggplant was extremely smoky and spicy and it really overpowered my bowl.  The chicken in my mom's dish was fine and more flavorful than my dish but again it tasted like a stir-fry that I could have made on my own. 

The banh mi was also disappointing.  The bread was completely hard and I decided to just skip it entirely.  The only thing that made this a "banh mi" was the shape of the bread and that it had pickled veggies on top.  Otherwise, there's was no pate, ham, pork, cucumber, large bunches of cilantro, or daikon.  They did use a spicy mayo that went well with the pork and chicken meatballs but other than that, there wasn't much spicy or kick to it.  I will say that of all the meats we tried, the pork and chicken meatball was the best.  It was moist and flavorful.  

Overall, I like the concept but it needs to be refined a lot more.  In general, it's harder for Asian ingredients to just be thrown together and just work like Mexican food.  A lot of these flavor profiles just don't seem to work together and the quality of the food was below the Chipotle standard.  But I am hopefully because I do love Chipotle deeply and love Asian street food, so hopefully they can get their act together and make it work.  Total bill for 2 bowls, 1 banh mi, and a ginger ale $24.

Photo Credit: Yelp