Lebanon’s oldest destination for Chinese food, China Station in the Miracle Mile Plaza, is getting its first big menu makeover since the Cantonese-style restaurant opened 31 years ago.
Owners Nina and Peter Chu, who opened China Station in 1988, are pruning the menu to a selection of combination platters, appetizers, noodles and fried rice dishes and eliminating dozens of individual dishes and entrees.
“We’re basically going to simplify it,” Nina Chu said. “People love the combination platters — that’s 80% of our business anyway. We’re going to try it and see how it goes.”
She said the decision was driven by the difficulty in finding a new Cantonese-style cook following the departure of longtime cook Ming Bui, who moved to California to take care of his mother, and a desire by her Peter, who is 68, to take it easier in the kitchen and begin easing into retirement.
But instead of closing China Station, Nina Chu said, they banded together with their daughter, Samantha Chu, who owns pasta restaurant Noodle Station and adjacent frozen yogurt counter The Swirl & Pearl in Hanover, to design a slimmed-down menu that would involve a lighter workload in the kitchen.
“We still want to be here for our patrons and customers,” Chu said.
The Chus will close China Station on Monday and reopen it with the new menu on Friday.
With Ming Bui gone, there are only two now working the kitchen — Peter Chu and another Asian cook. They are looking to add a third cook, but given the challenge in finding another Asian cook skilled in Cantonese-style dishes, “this time we’re willing to hire an American,” Nina Chu said.
Nine months after McDonald’s in White River Junction and Woodsville introduced touch-screen kiosks for ordering and tableside service, the McDonald’s in West Lebanon has done the same.
The Route 12A McDonald’s, one of the three busiest McDonald’s in New Hampshire, installed kiosks with six screens in the store earlier this month — most locations have four screens — but officially “went live” with them on Friday with a flourish not often seen at the fast-food outlet: fresh cut flowers on the dining tables.
“Fresh flowers are a nice, different look to celebrate the occasion,” said Larry Johnston “brand ambassador” for the Amherst, N.H.-based Napoli Group chain of McDonald’s restaurants (the West Lebanon kiosk marketing push includes a raffle until July 13 that entitles the winner to a free iPad, an overnight stay at the Mill Falls lake resort in Milford, N.H., or weekly “free Big Macs for a year.”)
So far, Napoli has installed in-store touch screen kiosks at about half of the 61 McDonald’s location the franchisee owns. Johnston said the kiosks on average generated a 10% bump in sales per location. Customers order at the touch screen and can either pay by bank card at the kiosk or with cash at the counter. They then take a number to where they want to sit and a few minutes later a “guest experience lead” (GEL) brings the meal on a tray to the table.
The West Lebanon McDonald’s does brisk business with tour buses and sports teams coming off I-89. Johnston says it serves about 2,000 customers per day. Given what Johnston describes as average revenue of $10 per transaction — 20% higher than a typical McDonald’s — that would indicate the West Lebanon franchise is selling some $20,000 of burgers, chicken nuggets, fries, sodas and shakes every 24 hours, or about $7.3 million annually.
Although currently representing only about a third of sales, McDonald’s expects touch-screen kiosk ordering will be the primary way most customers place their orders in the future.
“When we first introduced drive-thru windows, people said, ‘Who wants to eat in their car?’ ” said Gary McGee, who is overseeing rollout of the kiosks at Napoli’s McDonald’s locations. “Seventy percent of our business is now drive-thru, and kiosks are going to have a similar natural evolution.”
Contrary to a popular misconception, however, kiosks do not mean fewer people are needed to staff a location, according to Johnston and McGee. The boost in sales means more workers are needed in the kitchen to process orders while people who worked the counter are redeployed guiding customers through their choices at the kiosk and bringing meals to the table.
“I’d say this adds five to 10 employees per location,” Johnston said.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
