Walk in the main entrance of WMU’s student center and you’ll see Hou Jia, a glass-walled restaurant with a bar at the front. It’s owned by Jim Chiang, who also owns local Chinese restaurant chain Hunan Gardens.
Chiang said the restaurant and bar boasts a Taiwanese-fusion inspired menu with dishes like noodle bowls, bento boxes and boba tea – as well as beer, wine, sake and a Korean alcoholic beverage called soju.
"Our family [is] from Taiwan and we kind of tried to bring the culture to the campus," Chiang said. "And everybody enjoy the Taiwanese street food.”
The restaurant is the first of its kind at Western, and has restrictions on the type and amount of alcohol it can sell. Manager Marissa Wagner said customers have been surprised to see it being sold inside the student center.
"I don't think anyone realizes it, and then people come up to the counter and they're like, 'Wait, are those wine bottles?'," Wagner said.
Student Center director Paul Terzino says the school originally hoped to place a pub in the space, but wasn’t able to due to liquor licensing regulations.
"Learned a lot in the process of finding the right vendor, including kind of how the Michigan Liquor Commission, the MLC, how those rules and regulations affect us and our unique situation being on a campus and state school, so kind of going through some hits and misses. We finally landed on a restaurant that also had a license to sell alcohol," Terzino said.
According to Terzino, the original "pub" idea wasn't able to be completed due to special liquor licensing regulations that would require on-campus establishments to have a lower-tier liquor license that only permits them to sell beer and wine. Because of this, Terzino said Chiang's concept emerged as a good fit for the space because his restaurant chain Hunan Gardens already had the appropriate license.
“There was some concern about, ‘oh, you’re opening a bar to get drunk et cetera.’ That’s not - our intention is, first and foremost, really good food. Which I think we have, and as a complement, a nice glass of wine, nice glass of beer," Terzino said.
The restaurant is restricted from selling hard liquor or large volumes of beer or wine, like pitchers or full bottles of wine.
Hailey Smith and Abi Beem are both juniors at WMU studying mechanical engineering. They dined at Hou Jia on Wednesday, September 17 and said they were excited to see it open.
"Honestly, I don't know how to describe the food, but it's very tasty," Smith said.
Beem is 21, and even though she wasn't enjoying an alcoholic beverage on this day, she said having a bar and restaurant on campus seems like an appealing option for meeting friends after class.
"During construction I saw the beer taps and stuff in the back and so I knew that they were going to sell alcohol, but when I looked at the menu to see how much and what they were selling, I was very surprised," Beem said.
Hou Jia is located on the main level of the student center and is open to the public. The restaurant does not accept Dining Dollars.
