Restaurant review: This Seattle food hall has the look, feel and flavors of a Southeast Asian market

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.

But here’s the dirty little secret the late Anthony Bourdain never shared with his mainstream audience: most hawker markets in Southeast Asia don’t bat a thousand either.

The thrill of a treasure hunt is the kind of attitude you should take when venturing around Asean.

It’s most efficient to just order from any of the five kiosks, which include menus with food pictures and caption descriptions clear enough that you won’t need to Google the mystery dish. Ordering from the kiosk is the best way to stitch together a full dinner without having to line up at multiple stalls.

These were my six favorite dishes from Asean:

Laksa noodle soup ($18) at Phancy Pho stall

The specialty at the pho stand isn’t its namesake soup but this Malaysian noodle — a bowl of steaming coconut milk broth with isles of oil, redolent with yellow curry and shallots. The heartiest of all the soups here, this laksa is fortified with shrimp, bobbing deep-fried tofu, chicken, a boiled egg and interrupted by fiery chili. You can order this “mild,” but this creamy broth won’t go down easy without that capsaicin heat.

Hoy Tod mussel pancake ($16) at Hi Fry stall

A staple of midnight noshing in Thailand, this pan-fried pancake tilts on the greasy side, but it’s still an irresistibly crackly bite. The pancake has a crunchy surface as a counterpoint to a doughy belly interspersed with mussels, a scrambled egg and charred green onions. The pancake is then draped over a mound of bean sprouts sizzling on the iron skillet that doubles as the serving plate. Often compared to its cousin, the Vietnamese ban xeo or crepe, this rendition hews closer in texture to a Spanish chickpea seafood pancake. This pancake won’t hold up well as takeout.

The rice in the Hainanese chicken dish ($18) at Bugis Street counter

This is more about the chicken-flavored rice than the actual chicken. I could eat bowls of this fluffy rice that’s cooked in chicken broth, ginger and garlic. The lean white meat itself isn’t that flavorful, so you need to amplify the poultry flavor with the sides of chicken soup and a mound of jasmine chicken rice. This variation is served much hotter in temperature than the versions you would find at hawker stalls around Singapore. Add a side of boneless fried chicken ($12) and you got a meal for two.

Krapow Moo Krob crispy pork belly with rice ($18) at the Rolling Wok station

Shattering squares of cracklings are what makes this classic Thai dish a favorite at this food hall. This basil pork belly isn’t subtle. It screams with fiery spices and tangy and salty seasonings to ensure you augment each porky bite with spoonfuls of rice. Each blistered pork skin gets caramelized in salty, pungent fish sauce, garlic and specks of Thai chili to let you know you’re alive.

Mee Goreng Kee Mao ($18, add $3 for a fried egg, $3 for shrimp) at the Rolling Wok station

It’s an Indonesian-inspired version of Thai drunken noodles, though any Asian college student who has subsisted on grocery store ramen will know this as a dinner hack. It’s instant ramen from Nissin’s Cup Noodles, boiled to al dente texture then wok-fried with cabbage, green peppers, onions and amped up with shrimp paste and cumin. Ditch the grisly pork accompanying these noodles and splurge on the extra $3 for fried shrimp. Add a fried egg to ooze over those wavy noodles. It’s the best dish to order if you get the late night munchies.

The Lotus Croffle ($8.95) at Sweet Moon dessert station

I used to curse the Cronut for starting this Frankenstein dessert trend, but I’m all in on the Croffle, a croissant-waffle hybrid made popular in South Korea. The folded croissant pastry sheets get pressed in a waffle iron to form a crunchy, football shape chassis and then topped with a squiggle of cream with drippings of caramel sauce and crumbles of Biscoff cookies, powdered sugar and chocolate. Bite into this strata of buttery dough, and you’ll agree this is hands-down the best caramel dessert.