Joe Paraskevas
Life goes on. The craziness of life keeps coming back.
That’s how Andrew Lay sees things.
“Everything we do is crazy,” says the co-owner of Sula Wok. “When we built this place, we totally built on sweat equity.”
Lay, 52, is sitting at the front of Sula Wok, the restaurant he and his wife Xin Hui Su, or Sula, as everyone calls her, have made a fixture of the new Main Street.
Andrew Lay (second from right) and his wife Xin Hui Su (or Sula) (right) with their sons, from left: Kai Su, Hang Su and Yué Su, in the kitchen of their restaurant Sula Wok. In January, Sula Wok celebrated five years on Main Street. The family plans to open a new expanded restaurant adjacent to the existing one.
Photo by Joe Paraskevas
On a recent Sunday afternoon, all is quiet. Pass by the shop later –maybe as late as 11 p.m. – and you might find Sula at the back, hand-making momos, the beef, pork, chicken and vegetarian Tibetan dumplings for which the restaurant is known.
“We take our business very personally,” the 44-year-old businesswoman says.
In January, Sula Wok marked five years since its opening; five years Lay and Sula remember for the struggle to invest in the place and build it while living in a one-bedroom apartment next door with their three sons, Kai Su, now 15, Hang Su, 12 and Yué Su, nine, until the restaurant was ready.
Lay recalls the day he stood in the hole that would become the restaurant’s foundation after part of the wall that had been dug collapsed. He had raced madly to maintain the Blueskin protective membrane in place before contractors arrived to pour the concrete.
“A race against the clock,” he says, shaking his head.
“It was a desert,” Lay adds when asked what a small business owner faced on Main Street before the arrival of the Greystone development that brought new residents and commerce.
“By setting up your tent in the desert, you have to have a vision,” Lay says. “You have to have hope. You have to know you can see yourself through a dark time.”
After the restaurant went up came years of actually putting out the product: The family was running Sula Wok virtually by themselves because, as Lay says, “there’s a fine line (between) not being busy and being busy.”
That means it was difficult to hire and train staff when workdays sometimes went from virtual silence to scrambling to meet demand.
The Covid pandemic forced Lay and Sula to adapt, but it was also an unexpected boost to the restaurant’s reputation. The small customer tables at the back of their restaurant were forgotten. Sula Wok turned to pick-up and delivery only.
“The pandemic really clouds so much,” Lay says. “Honestly, I wonder where we would be if the pandemic hadn’t happened.”
The Sula Wok story is special
Ask Sula how she sees the five-year milestone.
“It’s very mixed,” she says. “Mixed with challenge, emotion and excitement.”
The kind of dedication to business Lay and Sula express is not unique. Plenty of restaurant owners could tell similar stories of late nights and early mornings.
The Sula Wok story is special for several reasons.
First, the restaurant could be considered emblematic of Main Street renewal.
Ten years ago, the Ottawa city council voted to convert Old Ottawa East’s primary thoroughfare into a ‘complete street’ with a more traditional balance between vehicle and pedestrian use.
Farewell, narrow sidewalks and racing cars. Hello, wide sidewalks, bicycle tracks and a civilized approach to community life.
That transition didn’t happen overnight. Main Street had to grow.
The Regional Group fueled that growth with a massive infusion of housing at Greystone. In its own way, Sula Wok added fuel too.
“Sula Wok has become a considerable success,” says John Dance, former president of the Old Ottawa East Community Association and currently the person in charge of planning on the OOECA board. “That’s what we wanted from the traditional Main Street.”
“Sula Wok is a fantastic independent restaurant,” says Capital Ward Coun. Shawn Menard, who counts himself among its many customers.
Do it all over again
And yet, the most compelling part of the Sula Wok story isn’t the battle of one family to make their small business survive.
It’s this: Lay and Sula want to do it all over again.
They have purchased 180 Main, the house next door to Sula Wok where they lived in cramped quarters half a decade ago. Their plan?
To turn that building into an even bigger Sula Wok: more elaborate, with a proper seating area in the depths, a pick-up window or two to greet sidewalk passers-by and a colorfully decorated alley – reminiscent of passageways common in China – between the existing Sula Wok restaurant and the one they want to build, linking the front of the new store to the back.
“The back of the restaurant we hope will have an eclectic feel,” Lay says. He wants to offer people a chance to sit down, have a meal or evening drink, and perhaps stop by outside during dinner hours.
“Call it a bar-like atmosphere,” he adds. “There will be the ambiance. There will be a character.”
Home for Asian pick-up food
Not that the new Sula will neglect its reputation as the home for Asian pick-up food customers have grown to love these last five years.
“I don’t think the take-out is going to go away,” Lay says.
Lay and Sula plan to lease or sell the existing restaurant space to another business.
Five residential units, two of them with rather impressive rooftop views would occupy the upper floors of the new structure. The combination of business and residential takes Lay and Sula back to the place and time when they met a decade and a half ago.
He was travelling in China. She was running the Yak Café in the southern city of Yangshuo.
It was the same formula the couple employed when they built the existing Sula Wok.
Lay and Sula hope plans for the new restaurant can receive City Hall approval by summer. Not surprisingly, challenges loom.
They have requested a number of by-law amendments, not the least of which is a reduction to the rear setback of the 180 Main Street property from 7.5 meters to four to allow more room for restaurant seating.
At a recent public meeting organized by Menard’s office, the OOECA, while generally supportive of plans for the new restaurant, raised concerns about the reduced setback and asked for greater tree cover as a buffer between the building and its neighbours.
The continuity of life
Lay and Sula’s application is expected to go before the city’s planning committee soon. Menard’s office is in favour of the development.
“Business development on Main Street is growing fast and has an exciting future,” Menard said in an e-mail.
It is a sentiment shared by some of the neighborhood’s most astute observers. At The Green Door, OOE’s flagship restaurant that will celebrate 30 years of business in 2023, co-owner Ross Farmer has a broader view of trends than almost anybody in the community.
“Especially with the new condo developments over the past half-decade, everyone in the neighbourhood has noticed the increase in not only population but also general wealth and status,” he says, in an e-mail.
“Prior to the Main Street redevelopment and construction boom, the neighbourhood felt as though it remained relatively status quo year-to-year. But since the redesign and the new condos of course, it feels a fair bit more bustling, with some increase in traffic and a general more upscale and polished ambiance.”
Into that dynamic atmosphere comes the new version of Sula Wok, a business whose idea emerged out of the old ‘status quo’ Main Street to be a torchbearer of the ‘upscale and polished’ version of today.
For Lay and Sula, who first imagined a community hub restaurant in their earliest days together on the other side of the world, the new restaurant represents the continuity of life … and perhaps the craziness.
“It fulfills a dream,” Lay says. “We dreamed of this in China. It’s a way to slow the traffic down when there’s animation in your streets. I think we’ve really created an animation that we didn’t have before.”
