In early March, Shin Thompson’s Furious Spoon ramen minichain was humming, with five locations in the city and Evanston, and a new one set to open in Indianapolis.
But contraction also presented him the opportunity to flex. As a kid, Thompson spent lots of time in Japan visiting family—he spent his first two years there. He grew up on the country’s unique form of curry and rice, or kare raisu, thick and enveloping, mild, sweet, and warmly spiced, with fat chunks of meat, carrot, and potatoes, often topped with a thick, crispy, panko-breaded, deep-fried pork or chicken cutlet. It’s among the first examples of yoshoku, or “Western food,” adapted to Japanese tastes after Portuguese traders and English merchants were first allowed into the country in the late 1800s.
He laughed when I asked what his investment was: “It was cheap. Bare bones. Under 25K.”
Once I reached the comfort of my own kitchen, I opened the bag and all the components of my order were packaged separately. The curries themselves, speckled with add-ons, such as green peas, enoki mushrooms, or charred broccoli, were steaming hot in tightly sealed jewel boxes. Rice, shredded cabbage, and pickled cucumber salad had their own containers, while the cutlets remained hot and crispy, in ventilated packaging.
Inside Avondale Foods’s ghost kitchen 3517 N. Spauldingbokuchans.com
