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By Olaf Growald
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By Olaf Growald
The newly opened Hoang’s Noodle House, you see, is located inside a Shell gas station in North Richland Hills. The dining room, made up of two community tables that seat six people each, sits among shelves of MD 20/20, four-packs of Sutter Home wine, racks of sunglasses, and a pair of eight-liner digital slot machines. When people get mad because they don’t win and slam their fists down on the machine, your fried rice bounces a bit.
Restaurants planted in gas stations have been a staple of restaurant culture since, decades ago, some clever entrepreneur put two and two together, combining the worlds of gas and sustenance. Ever since, they’ve been a mainstay of American roads, both paved and not.
The Fort Worth area is ripe with good gas station eateries: Bennett’s Grocery & Deli in Burleson, Chef Point in Watauga, Mariachi’s near downtown.
Hoang’s may mark a first, though. Johnnie and Alma Hoang’s spot could be the first gas station restaurant to offer Vietnamese cuisine, at least in North Richland Hills. It’s quite the sight, watching pho, fried lobster over garlic noodles, and beef ribs over rice coming out of the kitchen, steam rising, while people shop for White Claw and aspirin.
The couple chatted about their unique new eatery:
Q: You see burger joints and taquerias squeezed into gas stations. But Vietnamese seems like more of a challenge.
Alma: It is. What we do is a little more complicated, and just about everything is freshly made, by us, by hand, down to the eggrolls. We roll those ourselves, and if we have a big order, we need room to spread out. You can’t tell from the small dining area, but we have a pretty good-sized kitchen.
Q: I never thought I’d say this about eggrolls, but yours are outstanding.
Johnnie: That’s my grandmother’s recipe, for the most part. I implemented another ingredient for flavor, but I have to give her credit. They’re made from pork, carrots, taro, glass noodles – but no fish sauce. A lot of people don’t like eggrolls because they have a slightly fishy flavor, so I took out the sauce.
Alma: We offer samples of the eggrolls. Nine times out of 10, people will then order them. They’re really not like other eggrolls.
Q: Hoang’s started out as a food truck. What made you want to jump to a brick-and-mortar?
Johnnie: I was working at XTO downtown when the company announced it was moving to Houston. I felt like that was my opportunity to do something I always wanted to do — open my own restaurant. We loved doing the food truck, but we did it on the weekends only, and it was kind of a challenge.
Alma: It was a very small workspace; we’d often run out of ingredients because we didn’t know how many people would show up or not show up; the weather would affect us. It was more of an unknown. But it helped us mentally prepare for the restaurant, and so many people who knew us from the truck have followed us.
Q: What’d you think the first time you saw the gas station space?
A: At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It needed a lot of work. But Chef Point started out in a gas station. They were a big inspiration for us. Plus, we knew it was a unique concept — you don’t normally find restaurants that serve authentic Asian cuisine inside a gas station.
Q: What should a first-timer try?
Johnnie: The eggrolls, definitely. The beef ribs over rice is one of our signature items. I use a lemongrass sauce on the meat that gives it a distinct flavor.
Alma: Oh, the fried lobster with garlic noodles. That’s one of our best-sellers.
Johnnie: The chicken karaage, too. I use a lot of ...
Q: … seasoning. I love that you’re unafraid to season your food.
Johnnie: That’s the key to that dish, the seasoning.
Q: How did the two of you meet?
Alma: I was working for the city at the same time he was. I was working for the water department. He was in IT. He’d come fix my computer when it broke. The joke around the office was, “Alma, you broke your computer again just so he’d come fix it.”
Q: Where do the ideas for your dishes come from?
Johnnie: My wife and I and my family and I travel a lot. I’ve been to Vietnam several times, the West Coast, Chinatown in New York, wherever there’s a food scene, we’ll visit, just to try different restaurants. We’ll go to several in one day or night and try and share their signature dishes. We’ll food-hop — get one dish here, one there, and share everything, just to get an idea of what makes it good.
When I was in Vietnam, I would have pho every morning. That definitely inspired me to serve pho at our place. In Chinatown, we had a lot of small plates that you could share but also have for yourself. Some of our dishes are like that. Big enough for one, more than enough for two.
Alma: It’s fun traveling and trying new restaurants, but it’s also a way to come up with new ideas. We’ll think about a particular dish, and maybe that’ll inspire Johnnie in a small way, and then we’ll think of another dish we liked and that’ll inspire him in another way. We take small pieces from places we visit and come up with fresh ideas. It keeps us on our toes.
Hoang’s Noodle House
8405 North Harwood Road,
North Richland Hills
