A cook has to be something of a warrior to survive at QQ Kitchen.
First, there’s the heat — as the day goes on and tickets pile up, the fire beneath the woks creates smoldering temperatures. Then there’s the space, a narrow, tiny strip mall office remodeled to submarine-like cooking proportions. And beyond all that, you’ll have to contend with the takeout spot’s secret weapon — Na, or Grandma. “She’s a machine,” says manager Joshua Wang, who is something of a culinary ninja himself, clad in a lime green Nike headband.
The aformentioned kitchen battle began with the letter Q.
In Asia, when a food’s taste and texture are spot-on, they say it’s very Q, and so the Wangs — Na and Joshua, father Robert, mom Karen, sisters Emily and Ashley, uncle Jay and aunt Nina — named their new venture QQ Kitchen. They used recipes collected from their Chinese-Korean background and decided they would spend every day there as a team creating most of the menu from scratch — an anomaly for a 20-seat takeout spot. They had an artist uncle in China create a logo — a man slurping enthusiastically from a bowl of noodles — and did a modest remodel on a former H&R Block space in the Home Depot shopping center on Secor Rd.
Then, they hoped they would survive the restaurant honeymoon period.
Eleven months later, they’ve become takeout kitchen warriors, if only by necessity. Wait times for to-go orders of their hand-crafted noodle dishes reach two hours-plus; during the initial months food was selling so fast they’d often run out by evening and have to close. The requests for dishes like Korean barbecue, pad thai, and kimchee bacon fried rice can become something of an Asian food avalanche — they’re rumored to have to stop answering the phone in the frenzy of some lunch hours. They count local restaurateurs among their fans, like Barry Greenblatt of Barry Bagels, chef Rob Campbell of Revolution Grille, the Mancy brothers, and Dustin Hostetler of Grumpy’s.
“I think people aren’t dumb; they know when you make food fresh,” says Joshua during a pause in his cooking shift. “And you can definitely tell a homemade noodle to a frozen noodle.”
The results harken back to a time when Robert, a boy growing up in Seoul, used to watch his father Tse make “ja-jung,” black bean noodles, in his small restaurant. It’s a steaming, ominous-looking bowl of dark liquid spiked with squid, pork, shrimp, white onions and zucchini, poured onto a heap of neatly piled noodles. The accompanying kimchee (spicy, fermented cabbage) and danmuji (bright yellow, pickled radish) are a fresh, clean contrast to the rich and dense pool that is ja-jung.
The aim is to bring back to Asian-American food a certain amount of authenticity.
“I always ask [customers], what would you usually order at a Chinese restaurant?” Joshua says. “And then I tell them to order it here, because we take it to the next level.”
QQ Kitchen, 3324 Secor Rd. (in the Home Depot plaza). Open Monday through Saturday, 11am-3pm and 4:30pm-10pm. Closed Sunday. 419-720-8703. www.qqkitchen.com.
