WEST LEBANON — Duncan Carroll has been coming to Oriental Wok Express, the Chinese takeaway tucked inside the gas station on North Main Street, for over a decade.
An employee at KIS Clean Outs, a home clean-out business based in Wilder, he often stops by for two orders of sesame chicken and fried rice: one for lunch, and one for dinner.
He comes for “the convenience, and the quality,” he said while picking up food at the restaurant on Wednesday afternoon.
But Carroll will soon have to find a new place to get a quick lunch as the owners of Oriental Wok Express are preparing to close the restaurant in March after the building’s new owner Stewart’s Shops, a New York-based convenience store chain, has opted not to renew the restaurant’s lease.
“I’m disappointed,” Carroll, of Sharon, said. “I love this place.”
The decision to shutter the restaurant comes on the heels of Stewart’s Shops’ large-scale acquisition of all the 45 stores owned by Jolley Associates, a tri-state convenience store chain formerly based in St Albans, Vt., in late 2024, including the West Lebanon Jolley, and another on Lebanon Street in Hanover.
Robin Cooper, a Stewart’s spokesperson, declined to give the cost of the acquisition.
A few months ago, representatives from the convenience chain informed the owners of Oriental Wok that the new property owners would not be renewing the restaurant’s lease, which ends in March.
Stewart’s operates its own line of ice cream, coffee and grocery products, and “We don’t have outside operators in the majority of our properties,” Cooper said in an interview.
“I’m not too happy about it,” Steve Ross, Oriental Wok’s co-owner, said of the closure.
“It’s mixed emotions on my part because I’m trying to retire,” said Ross, a 73-year-old Lebanon resident.
He and his business partner Chang Lin, 52, who immigrated to the U.S. from China when he was a teenager, opened Oriental Wok Express in the West Lebanon gas station almost exactly 20 years ago.
Lin and Ross met unexpectedly when the two were living in upstate New York and they struck up a conversation while helping someone carry donations from her car to a soup kitchen where they volunteered.
Like nearby Chinese restaurants such as Men at Wok in West Lebanon’s Glen Road Plaza, Oriental Wok offers a wide array of comfort dishes from fried rice to egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken, all served out of a no-frills takeout bar inside the convenience store.
On Wednesday, the smell of fried food wafted from the restaurant’s kitchen, located directly behind the counter. Two tables with plastic coverings were pushed against a wide window, and a mini fridge was stocked with containers of kimchi, sushi and bottles of aloe vera drinks.
Jessica Li, Chang Lin’s wife and one of Oriental Wok’s three employees, including her husband, stood behind the counter, ready to take customers’ orders.
When Carroll went to pay for his food, Li knocked a few dollars off the bill because he’s a repeat customer. Most of Oriental Wok’s entrees are in the $10 to $12 range.
The dishes are “incredibly affordable and offer great value,” Laine Gillespie, of Enfield, shared in an email.
Despite Oriental Wok’s modest location, the restaurant has gained a devoted following over the years including Dartmouth College doctoral student Nicole Kordana and her colleagues at one of the college’s labs.
Saddened about the restaurant’s closure, she and her colleagues ordered lunch from Oriental Wok on Thursday afternoon.
“I love going to the restaurant. I remember moving to the Upper Valley for grad school and everyone would rave about this place,” Kordana said.
“The weird thing about it is that it’s in a gas station,'” people would tell her. “‘But you just have to trust it.'”
Among Kordana’s favorite dishes at Oriental Wok is the General Tso’s Chicken, pieces of chicken smothered in a sweet and savory sauce.
“It’s got a really homey taste…with the perfect amount of spice,” Kordana said.
Kathleen, a Lyme resident who declined to give her last name, has been coming to the restaurant for five or six years, usually when she’s running errands and needs a convenient lunch.
“The people are friendly,” she said. “And the food is good.”
On Wednesday, she ordered lo mein and beef with mushrooms, two of her favorites. Sometimes she’ll go for the chicken and broccoli, which she enjoys because the dish isn’t fried, and it includes veggies and a little protein.
“I’m bummed” that Oriental Wok is closing, she said. “I loved to stop by.”
Following the acquisition of the convenience store, leadership at Stewart’s Shops has tentative plans to renovate the property in 2027, though there are “no initial plans filed” with the city yet, Cooper said.
At this point it’s too early to know how extensive the renovation would be, or whether the company would conduct a full rebuild, he added.
In lieu of an Asian restaurant, there are plans to put in an ice cream counter serving milkshakes, ice cream cones and other frozen desserts, Cooper said.
Stewart’s got its start as an ice cream business, when brothers Percy and Charles Dake purchased a small dairy farm and ice cream production facility in Ballston Spa, New York, in 1945.
The company now operates roughly 400 locations across New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. The Hanover and West Lebanon locations are the only Stewart’s Shops in the Upper Valley.
More than 350 Stewart’s have ice cream counters, Cooper said.
Over the last 10 to 15 years, the company has been working to expand the ice cream counters to make room for savory lunch options such as sandwiches and subs, he said.
At the moment, Lin and Ross don’t expect they’ll open a new restaurant anytime soon.
The business partners also run Roslin’s Asian Foods, a wholesale distributor based on Water Street in Lebanon that supplies sushi to area markets and grocery stores, which they plan to keep open.
After two decades of running Oriental Wok, Lin is ready to take a break. “We had 20 years. I think we had a good amount,” he said.