New Seattle food hall has the look, feel and flavors of a Southeast Asian market (neighborhood)

[homesinseattle]

A very cool development Downtown, my wife and I went there around 8pm the other night, was vibrant and fun. Here’s the link: https://www.seattletimes.com/life/fo...-market/?amp=1

“Push through the doors of Asean StrEAT Food Hall and your first thought, leaving the drab, dreary downtown on a gray day, is that you’ve entered one of those movies where the world suddenly changes from black and white to Technicolor. You think you may have accidentally entered a subterranean carnival arcade. The decibels are loud. The lights bright. The color scheme is best described as fruit Life Savers.

Located on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Pine Street, Asean is the new Singapore-style hawker center that apparently every Asian American college student with an Instagram or WhatsApp account knows about. There is constant online chatter about the 100 different rice, soups and noodles served at this Westlake Center food hall.

And while Asean may not hit all the marks on the street food it pays homage to, this food hall is still good fun. Barkers behind counters yell to customers that their orders of hang lay pork curry and ukoy shrimp fritters are ready. Sometimes customers even hear them, amid the constant din of the boisterous communal dining area.

The chamber of commerce should give Asean owner Punya Tipyasothi the entrepreneur of the year award for the foot traffic he has brought downtown after the pandemic years.

During lunch, the line to order sometimes snakes across the dining area. Another forms around 6 p.m. when office workers linger for Hainanese chicken and Burmese tofu curry. On Saturdays, the food hall fills with 20-something Asians and Asian Americans who are bent on ordering everything on the menu in one sitting.

But Tipyasothi isn’t peddling noodles so much as he is hawking the romance of street food culture. He’s selling a memory of the best bowl of laksa noodles you ever ate — not just because the curry was so good, but because you ate it squatting on a street corner in some Southeast Asian country, already sweating in the morning heat, as mopeds whizzed by. As if your memory needed a nudge, four giant screens along the wall show customers doing just that.

This 8,600-square-foot-food hall is Tipyasothi’s homage to all the night markets he frequented while growing up in Bangkok and also while hopscotching between Singapore and Vietnam before he settled in Seattle in 1987 and later opened Western Washington chain Racha Noodles & Thai Cuisine.

His food hall tries to include at least one dish from each Southeast Asian country, though the menus skew heavily toward Thai, Burmese, Singaporean and Malaysian cuisines. The menus have been streamlined due to the labor shortage, but you can still find between five to 10 different dishes at each stall.

He recruited a vendor to set up a Vietnamese Cajun seafood boil counter. Tipyasothi and his executive chef Ploy Boonma conceptualized the other 12 stalls, with each section divided by cooking stations: Asian soups are sold at the Phancy Pho stall, stir-fries at the Rolling Wok stall, egg rolls and other deep-fried noshes at the Hi Fry stall, stews and poached chicken at the Bugis Street stall and curry bowls and clay pot rice at the Zaab Eli stall. For those with a sweet tooth, there are four stations with crepes, ice cream, pastries and bubble tea.

Opening this February will be a bao counter to hawk dumplings and steamed buns stuffed with Peking duck. By spring, Tipyasothi will add a cocktail bar to sling tropical drinks.

In the past four weeks, I’ve eaten my way through at least half of the menu items at most stalls. Some of what I ordered was at best serviceable, nothing you couldn’t find at your neighborhood Asian takeout joint. A few stir-fries were missing that smoky wok-hei flavor, while a couple of dishes were big missteps; a pho that tasted like a random soup du jour instead of any ingredient resembling beef and some mushy clumps of crab fried rice that offered just some measly, stringy meat.“

[Hebrews12]

Sounds interesting. Yelpers aren't giving it great ratings, though so maybe it needs a little time to work out the kinks.

[leastprime]

I sometimes stop to get a meal here, Taste of X'ian. Haven't been in WLC in 5-6 weeks. Glad that they are improving the food fare, which is kinda weak in the this area of town.