Tom Liang, owner of Thayer Street's landmark Chinese food truck, is covered in plaster.
Construction, rather than General Tso's chicken, is filling his days as he prepares to open a Chinese restaurant with a firm foundation rather than four wheels. The finished product, Chinese Iron Wok, will be located on Brook Street near Loui's Restaurant and will offer Szechuan-style dishes, known for their spicy flavors.
It will also bring revenue to a familiar landlord — the University, which owns the property at Benevolent and Brook Streets.
Liang closed his Seekonk restaurant, the first Chinese Iron Wok, in August to focus exclusively on construction, he said. He's on site every day to ensure an opening date in late October.
"Building your restaurant is part of the fun," Liang said. "It allows you to really know it."
Building on Brook
The new restaurant will be split into two floors, each catering to a different Chinese food hankering. The first floor will house a faster, less expensive option, selling the American favorites that have brought in brisk business to Liang's truck. On the second floor, the pace will be slower and the prices higher, as diners will have the opportunity to order more complicated and authentic dishes for a complete sit-down menu, Liang said.
Liang has noticed that many Brown students are vegetarians and want healthy options, he said, and the menu at Chinese Iron Wok will reflect that.
One Brown professor is already a fan of the soon-to-open eatery.
"It will be interesting to see how Brown students learn to eat" Liang's more authentic dishes, said Professor of Computer Science Andy van Dam, a self-professed "Chinese food nut." Van Dam said he's a fan of Schezuan dishes because of their "use of chili peppers and hot oils."
The skeleton of the kitchen has already been built. It doesn't exactly resemble that of an average American restaurant because, as Liang pointed out, Chinese methods of cooking differ from those used to prepare most American foods. A line of giant woks are set in a metal trough in the middle of the kitchen. Four chefs will work the woks, each manning three. Six chefs in another section of the kitchen will prep raw ingredients.
Liang has outfitted the kitchen with a large vent, necessary for wok cooking because of the large jet fires that reach 800 degrees. It takes only two seconds for the woks to heat up, after which ingredients are cooked in an oil wok. Then, excess grease is washed off and the food is transferred to another wok, in which it is cooked by flipping it into the air an odd number of times to ensure that all sides are cooked evenly.
"I want to engineer-ize the kitchen," Liang said. To accomplish this feat, he has imported a machine from China capable of making 9,000 dumplings in a single hour. In comparison, a very fast chef can only make 150 per hour, he said. Liang also plans to purchase a bean curd machine to make fresh tofu.
An enterprising engineer
Liang, a native of northern China and an MIT-educated engineer, was inspired to open a mobile restaurant by the multitude of trucks he noticed populating Cambridge during his studies. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus supports 10 trucks, each of which can sell 1,200 boxes of food a day.
Liang chose Providence five years ago for his Chinese food truck because his wife was then working toward her doctorate in computer science at Brown. He estimated that there are 400 to 500 Chinese restaurants in Rhode Island alone but said the almost complete lack of competition from authentic Chinese eateries drew him to the city.
Many Brown students frequent Shanghai, Thayer street's only Chinese restaurant, which Liang said he respects as a successful business. But, he added, Shanghai's menu is heavily influenced by American tastes.
Van Dam, who has taught at Brown since the 1960s, said he has personally suffered from the lack of authentic Chinese food in Providence.
"When I got recruited to Brown, I was taken to a Chinese restaurant, and it nearly convinced me not to go here," he said.
During the planning stages for the Center for Information Technology, van Dam had four requests: "large windows, atriums, a shower and a top-notch Chinese restaurant in the basement."
Three were met. The Chinese restaurant, however, remained in van Dam's imagination.
"President (Howard) Swearer wasn't a foodie, so that was just too weird for him," van Dam said.
Van Dam has taken his passion as far as learning just enough Chinese from friends to be able to order off the Chinese-language menus at restaurants, a move which has rewarded him with "incredibly great food," he said.
When he noticed that "Providence had only horrible Chinese-American food that bore no resemblance to Chinese food of any kind," van Dam said he was ecstatic to learn that one of his student's husbands owned an authentic Chinese restaurant in Seekonk.
Van Dam quickly became both a fan and a friend of Liang's as well as a frequent patron of his Seekonk restaurant. At van Dam's behest, Chinese Iron Wok started catering parties for TAs in the department of computer science.
Van Dam soon embarked on a campaign to bring Chinese Iron Wok closer to campus.
"‘Tom, you gotta move closer to campus' became an ongoing conversation for years," van Dam said. "I offered to help him connect to the right people at Brown."
Rolling out a new business
It was through van Dam that Liang was put in contact with Director of Real Estate John Luipold.
"Andy van Dam called and said he knew Tom was interested in finding a space around campus," Luipold said. "He asked me to talk to Tom about any opportunity we might have."
The Brown-owned commercial space that Liang and Luipold identified on Brook street had been vacant for seven years, Luipold said. Farview, Inc., Brown's real estate entity, started marketing the space to merchants about one-and-a-half years ago, he said.
The space has been a bit of a challenge, Luipold said, because "most retailers want to be directly on Thayer." The generally dismal real estate market compounded the difficulties they faced in finding a tenant, he said.
In leasing the property, Luipold said he was looking to have a "positive impact in the area by finding a good tenant that people knew and were supportive of." Liang's truck's popularity among students proved him to be an ideal choice, Luipold said.
Under city law, Liang's truck can park for only an hour at a time in its traditional space outside the Sciences Library, but in that hour Liang said he can sell about one hundred boxes.
"It makes for good food during those chemistry pre-labs," said Francesca Santiago '10.
"It's a nice, cheap place for lunch," said Jeremy Korn '13. "It's a staple of the community."
But with the opening of the new restaurant, Liang said he is unsure if he will be able to keep the truck operating.
On or off wheels, Liang has van Dam's enthusiastic support.
"I'm really hoping it takes off," he said. "It will make a lot of Brown students and Providence natives happy. A real Chinese restaurant has been a goal since I got here in '65."
