Hawkers, the Asian Street Fare concept, is moving its Central Kitchen headquarters to downtown Orlando and will be located on Church Street.
Make that over Church Street. The Central Florida-grown mini-chain will move from Clermont to 54 W. Church St. and its new space will incorporate the glass-enclosed bridge that spans the street at Church Street Market.
“I can’t tell you how excited we are to get back to the urban core,” said co-founder Kaleb Harrell. Team members, he said, have created a hashtag — #CountdownToDowntown — that they use as shorthand whenever they become frustrated with commuting to the current headquarters.
The company will more than double its current space, growing from 4,000 square feet to about 9,000. It’s space that is sorely needed, said Harrell. “We have people in floating desks in the hallway” in the current space. He said that there are currently 15 staff members occupying the Central Kitchen and that he expects to double the staff within a year. “We’ll probably fill that space within three years and have to expand,” he said. Harrell, pictured at left, also said that he and his partners hope that when that time comes they’ll be able to expand the space rather than have to move again. “It’ll be nice to have a home.”
The new headquarters, which the company calls Central Kitchen, will have an employee lounge with games, a test kitchen and a mock dining area with bar where the company can host tasting events. Additionally, the event space will be available for rent to groups of 50 to 75 people.
Although it will have a kitchen and dining space, the headquarters will not operate as a restaurant. It will be more along the lines of Red Lobster’s corporate headquarters less than a block away. That restaurant chain moved to downtown Orlando after it split from Darden Restaurants. It also has a full test kitchen and mock dining room for training purposes but is not open to the public.
Coincidentally, the Church Street space was once the setting for a full Olive Garden restaurant. Part of the new headquarters was also the original location of Howl at the Moon, a dueling piano bar concept now on International Drive.
Hawkers currently has four locations with two others under construction, including a second in Orlando in the Windermere area. Harrell, who operates the business with partners Allen Lo, Wayne Yung and Kin Ho, said they have ambitious expansion plans. “We want to be a regional brand,” he said, reaching as far north as Chicago.
The partners opened the first Hawkers in Orlando at 1103 N. Mills Ave. The name is a reference to vendors who operate on the streets of various cities throughout Asia hawking their foods to passersby.
The company’s “countdown to downtown” is scheduled to end in February.
