Monday, August 6, 2012

News to Me: The Thai Chipotle

The information is dated September 2011, but is news to me nonetheless: Chipotle founder tries new Asian format with ShopHouse. The website is (here), and it lists only one location in Washington DC. I wonder if the company feels that the concept still has not been sufficiently tweaked to warrant expansion. From the article date, the restaurant would have been opened for about a year now.

I was in DC a year ago (and sadly, did not know about the place at the time). However, there are other places that are Chipotle-like for other types of food. Roti in particular comes to mind (website here).

A random statistic: as of August 6, 2012, the ShopHouse has 1,427 likes on Facebook, versus 1,850,393 likes for Chipotle. That is a multiple of 1,297. According to Wikipedia (reference here), there are 1,316 locations for Chipotle. The popularity of the ShopHouse as measured by Facebook likes, accounting for the number of locations (somewhat), seems comparable to Chipotle.