A longtime family-owned restaurant in Cascade is working toward reopening in the coming weeks after a kitchen fire on January 9th forced it to close.
How the Fire Started
First Wok, which has served the community for 25 years, closed after a grease fire broke out during the lunch rush on Jan. 9. The fire started around noon when an employee was preparing rice noodles for Mongolian beef in one of the wok fryers.
“So what was happening is one of our deep fryers was prepping the rice noodles for like the Mongolian beef,” said Tony Yu, operations manager for First Wok and son of the restaurant’s owners. “And so when he was preparing the rice noodles, he stuck the large batch of noodles into the fryer, one of the wok fryers, but there was a pocket water, and once the pocket of water hit that oil, kind of splattered, caught fire.”
The fire quickly spread to the hood system, with the fire suppression system activating before firefighters arrived within minutes. Four to five tables of customers and takeout orders were in progress when the fire broke out…