Courtesy Chai Ploentham
Chai Ploentham is no stranger to the challenges of the restaurant industry. He's operated sushi restaurant Blue Ocean in University City for 12 years and purchased Zenwich, a sandwich shop based in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 2019, with plans to bring the concept to St. Louis.
Originally Ploentham hoped to debut Zenwich in March, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the St. Louis area, he pushed the opening back by more than two months. In recent weeks, as restaurants across the St. Louis area reopened for dine-in service, Ploentham dialed in an opening day for Zenwich, which officially opened for business June 1 at 8½ S. Euclid Avenue in the Central West End.
“People like me, a restaurant owner or entrepreneur, we gotta have our business going— we cannot just stay home,” Ploentham says. “Many people have asked me, ‘Why open a business right now?’ Even my mom asked, ‘Why didn't you just wait?’ But if we don’t open now, when? I gotta get back to work. I feel glad that I’m making food again. That's what I love, and seeing people supporting us makes me very happy.”
Zenwich is currently only accepting orders for curbside pickup and delivery, but Ploentham looks forward to the day when he can open the dining room as well. For now, customers can place orders online through Zenwich’s website, but when the dining room does open, that contactless ordering will continue inside the fast-casual restaurant.
That’s because Ploentham has invested in kiosks that allow customers to enter the restaurant, point their camera phones at a QR code on the kiosk screen, and then order and pay for their food entirely through their phones. When Zenwich opens for dine-in service, Ploentham hopes the contactless ordering system will be another way to make customers feel comfortable.
“I saw this for the first time probably like three years ago in China,” Ploentham says. “My wife and I sat down at a noodle shop, and there was a QR code on the table. She pulled out her phone, used her camera, the menu popped up, and we ordered. After the food came, we ate and then we just left. It was so convenient, easy, and fast, and there was no interaction at all.”
Courtesy Chai Ploentham
Slow-roasted pork belly, Thai-style, with matchstick daikon and carrot, pickled cucumber, red onion, cilantro, and a tangy sweet aioli
Courtesy Chai Ploentham
Spicy garlic quinoa rice paper wrap
The Zenwich location in the Central West End features an expanded menu from the flagship in Illinois. In addition to offering customers five sandwiches and wraps—including fillings such as Korean cheesesteak, spicy garlic tofu, and garlic shrimp—the St. Louis outpost features five types of ramen, a house specialty at Blue Ocean.
Ramen bowls range from the Taiwanese Spicy Beef (with caramelized onion, a fish and soy sauce broth, crushed chiles, bamboo and hot chile oil) to The Ocean (with bay scallops, Maine lobster, Alaskan snow crab, crushed chiles, spicy miso broth, sweet corn, scallions, cilantro, and chile oil).
Courtesy Chai Ploentham
Quality ingredients and from-scratch preparation are important to Ploentham, so those piping hot bowls of spicy beef ramen are filled with noodles made from Missouri rice, while sandwiches are piled high with house-marinated meat and house sauces. Ploentham says every menu item can be altered to be made with tofu, and gluten-free quinoa-rice wraps are available in place of bread.
As for the restaurant’s interior, Ploentham says he didn’t make too many changes, as the existing dining room and kitchen, previously occupied by Taze Mediterranean Street Food, was already a stunning space.
Courtesy Chai Ploentham
“The space already had a really good layout, so I didn’t change that much,” Ploentham says. “And I didn’t want to change much, because I wanted to follow the principle of being zen: If something is already working, why change it?
“We used to be very cocktail-focused [at Blue Ocean], and we had a really good vibe in the dining room; we would have a good time,” Ploentham says. “Now we just focus on food to go and get back to the basics of being a restaurant. People need to eat and we feed them. We get back to what really matters—not the ambience, the wine, or the cocktails—but just the core, which is food.”
Zenwich is open 11 a.m.–7 p.m. daily. Keep up with the latest via the restaurant's Facebook page.
