Arrive Magazine - March/April 2012

Michael Wang

An entrepreneur goes back to school and returns to his roots

Clockwise, above: Michael Wang; the chicken katsu sandwich, a customer favorite; the interior of Foumami.

Michael Wang, founder of the hit asian sandwich bar Foumami in Boston’s financial district (and less than five minutes’ walk from Boston’s South Sta-
tion), is a third-generation restaurateur. in the 1940s,
his grandfather founded the famed Chew Young roo
chain of restaurants in asia, which his family ran for
some 50 years. So when Wang, now 41, began thinking
about a new career path, one thing was clear: “i grew
up in my family’s restaurant, and i’ve always said to
myself that i didn’t want to get into this business.”
Wang, who moved with his family to the United
States when he was 7, learned early that owning a res-
taurant is an all-consuming lifestyle. So when he gradu-
ated from new York University in 1993, he headed in a
fairly opposite direction—the fixed-income division at
goldman Sachs. thus began a varied series of jobs that
eventually led him to the realization that he wanted to
be an entrepreneur, and that the knowledge and experi-
ence to which he had been born was perhaps his most
valuable entrepreneurial asset.

and so came Harvard Business School and two years of intense research that led Wang to his winning concept—a “quick casual” restaurant, in industry parlance, that draws on 5,000 years of asian culinary tradition and the contemporary appetite for novel and fresh approaches to food.

to find the most important element, Wang needed to look no further than his family’s ancestral home in China’s Shandong province, the birthplace of dough-based products such as noodles, dumplings and—most importantly for Wang’s purposes—shao bing, a distinctive bread that is crisp on the outside and chewy inside.

“What makes a great sandwich is really the bread,”
he says, “and i felt that that bread could be the base of
my sandwiches.”
Wang uses shao bing to encapsulate favorite tastes
from China, korea and Japan. one customer favorite
is the Japanese chicken katsu, topped with shred-
ded cabbage, tomatoes and Japanese Worcestershire
sauce. another gives an authentic Chinese braised
meat recipe an american twist with marinated,
braised beef brisket, accented with scallions, kirby
cucumber and cilantro.

to give a name to his eclectic creation, Wang invented “Foumami.” it’s a portmanteau that combines “umami,” the Japanese word for “tasty,” with “Fo,” the transliteration of a Chinese character that alludes to the parable Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, in which the wafting aroma of delicious cooking entices a Buddhist monk to jump over the wall of his monastery.

With plans to expand in Boston and eventually take Foumami to other cities, how does Wang feel about his own jump over the wall of his initial doubts concerning the restaurant business?