If you're a devotee of The Wash — the East Side collection of restaurants, a bar and a patio housed in a former car wash — you’ve probably been eyeing two currently open bays (Bay 3 and Bay 4) with anticipation. Maybe you’ve sat on the patio, eating a bowl of vegan pho and daydreaming, What will accompany the goodness of East Side Pho, Two Peruvian Chefs, Soy Cubano and Bay 6 Bar?
Well, daydreams answered: Coming soon are SS Gai and Sweeza. Both projects are operated by the You Are Here Hospitality restaurant group (the team behind East Side Banh Mi and East Side Pho). You Are Here Hospitality is a Nashville-based food and beverage company owned by Gracie Nguyen and Chad Newton. The two will be running Sweeza while Chris and Emma Biard will run (and own) SS Gai. Newton acknowledges it is unusual for a restaurant company not to own the concepts in their incubator program. Their vision is to help lower the barrier to entry for women and minority business owners by assisting as operations advisers without taking equity.
“We are there to assist them,” Newton says in an exclusive interview with the Scene about the openings. And he couldn’t be happier about the team. “Chris and Emma are really fabulous people.”
SS Gai (short-hand for “same-same but different chicken”) will offer a “small, focused menu” (which is probably what can reasonably fit in a small kitchen in The Wash), centered on traditional recipes for Gai Yang (grilled chicken) and Gai Tod (fried chicken). Each dish will be paired with sticky rice, shallots, tamarind chili fish sauce and aromatic chili vinegar. SS Gai will create its Thai flavors by coal-roasting and using a mortar and pestle to make marinades, sauces and salad, such as a charred eggplant salad.
Sweeza is named as a play on the San Francisco Mission District street food staple, “super quesadilla suiza,” and will serve ingredients such as cheeses, meats, salsa, crema and avocado wrapped in an oversized flour tortilla and griddled until it's golden brown. Sweeza will also serve tostadas, ensaladas and salsas, and agua frescas, but don’t come hankering for a taco. There are lots of other great tacos in town, Newton says, so they wanted to focus their menu on what they felt they could do differently.
Sweeza
Both restaurants will have entrees in the $10 to $12 range with some snacks and smaller items at a lower price. Because East Side Pho is also owned by You Are Here Hospitality, Newton says the three restaurants at one location will be able to streamline some of their back-of-house operations.
“The spirit of The Wash is that it is a low barrier to entry," Newton says. "You can try out a restaurant there. And when it can take $1 million to open a new restaurant [elsewhere], that’s important."
Newton expects both restaurants to have soft openings in the next few weeks and to be serving full menus in time for summer patio meals in June. The Wash is located at 1101 McKennie Ave.
