Another day, another fast casual option in D.C., and this one’s giving away free food on Thursday to its first customers.

Street Carts, a new Southeast Asian eatery, is setting up shop in part of the old Tortilla Coast space in Logan Circle (the restaurant closed  in 2017 and the space has sat empty ever since.)

It is the latest venture from the owners of  Phillips Seafood, a Baltimore-based company that owns a seafood distribution business and several restaurants.

The fast-casual drill involves picking a base (jasmine rice, veggie fried rice, noodles, stir-fried vegetables), adding a protein (choices include fried tofu, wok shrimp, and grilled chicken), and finally a sauce (take your pick from teriyaki, sweet & sour, Thai green curry, and others). The first 200 people to stop by the store on Thursday after it opens at 11 a.m. will get a free signature bowl.

The menu goes beyond building your own bowls, though, looping in pad thai, wonton soup, Vietnamese shrimp summer rolls, mango sticky rice, various salads (including Laotian minced chicken salad), and more.

The cuisine is inspired by the street food carts and culture that owner Steve Phillips experienced in Southeast Asia on the frequent trips he made there for Phillips Foods starting in the 1990s when he was building crab and other seafood processing factories in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and India.

“This concept this comes from a place of love,” says his son, Brice Phillips, director of club store sales for Phillips Foods, who also worked on the concept. “My father has fallen head over heels in love with this food culture.”

Some of the food stalls and carts they saw in Bangkok were decades old. And some of the folks are running the same street carts their grandparents owned. That resonates with Phillips Foods, a family-owned company that launched as a seafood plant in 1914 and started opening restaurants in 1956.

Phillips has restaurants and hotels in Baltimore, Atlantic City, Ocean City, and elsewhere. In D.C., the company operated Phillips Flagship Restaurant, a buffet on the Southwest waterfront from 1985 to 2014 before development transformed the area. More recently, the company launched and closed 10 Tavern in Chinatown within 15 months.

In a few weeks, they hope to open a Phillips Seafood & Steak restaurant, which will serve up premium steaks and seafood, right next door to Street Carts.

Street Carts, meanwhile, held a soft opening on June 20. “Now that we have two to three weeks under our belt, I think our staff is ready to push this thing out and do this event on Thursday,” Brice Phillips says, adding that they are considering adding Indian cuisine to the mix and hammering out delivery options.

But first, those free bowls.

Street Carts will be open 11 a.m.-10 p.m. every day at 1454 P Street NW.