A new Thai restaurant is moving into the old Typhoon! location on Bond Street, on the first floor of Franklin Crossing.
The restaurant, called Noi, is owned by a Seattle-based Thai family with two existing restaurants in that city, said Darren Powderly, president of Compass Commercial, which assisted in the leasing of the property.
“It is really high quality authentic Thai,” said Powderly. “It’s going to be as good, if not a lot better than Typhoon!”
Typhoon! went out of business earlier this year after the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industry charged the chain of restaurants with multiple violations of state civil rights laws. BOLI found that the company “used its leverage over workers recruited from Thailand to impose lower pay, longer hours and unfavorable contract terms,” according to a December news release from the agency.
The same owners of Typhoon! had leased a second space in the Franklin Crossing building called Bo Restobar. That location was also closed when the company went out of business. The former Bo space, which features a bar and full kitchen, has not yet been leased, said Powderly.
Powderly said that Noi purchased Typhoon!’s restaurant furnishings and kitchen equipment, but has also acquired a great deal of equipment and décor from Thailand, where the family that owns Noi maintains strong ties.
The lease for the space was actually signed in Bangkok by several family members, said Powderly.
Noi has applied for a liquor license and should open within the next few months.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2012.
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we’ll just assume the Thai staff they employ will be earning fair wages for their hard work and not further driving down the cost of labor for all other job seekers eh Powderly?
I just did a search for a Noi Thai restaruant in Seattle. Nothing there.
I wonder how long this business will last before a government agency makes it illegal for them to remain open.
A fair wage is a wage that someone is willing to work for. If it becomes an “unfair wage” the employee will quit. Typhoon! was obviously the best employment option for each and every employee that worked there. If it wasn’t, each and every one of them would have quit and taken whatever was their best option. Now that they are shut down, their employees are forced to either go unemployed OR take the 2nd best job that they could find thanks to OBLI- another example of government getting in the way and making things worse.