Town Talk: Chinese restaurant moving ahead at 23rd and Iowa; Bartlett & West moving to West Lawrence; city to purchase $850,000 fire engine; Varsity House nearing approval

News and notes from around town:

As we previously have reported, a new Chinese restaurant is in the works for the former Peking Taste building at 2210 Iowa St. Back in August, Will Soo told me he was planning to open a restaurant called Chong’s Chowhouse. Well, a fortune cookie must have told him to rethink that name because plans have changed. Soo has announced that he’ll be opening up a more upscale than average Chinese restaurant in the former Peking space called 8 Flavors. The name alludes to the eight regional cuisines of China. Extra credit if you can list them all. I’ll get you started. There is Egg Rollish, Crab Ragoonish, and the most important one, All You Can Eatish. What? That’s not it. Well, no one ever said I was fluent in Chinese. But I believe 8 Flavors will offer those traditional elements of a Chinese restaurant — plans call for a lunch buffet, while dinner will be menu service. But Soo — who has his degree in food and beverage management and most recently was a cook at Pachamamas — clearly wants to do a little bit out of the ordinary as well. The menu will feature dishes such as Tea Smoked Chicken, Napa Cabbage Buns, and handmade noodles and dumplings. Plus, he plans to operate his own chemical and hormone-free garden to supply Thai basil, Chinese chives and other produce to the restaurant. Wine and a selection of Asian beers also will be served. Plans call for the restaurant to open in January.

• If you are like me, you sometimes feel like you need an engineer when you go to a Chinese, all-you can-eat buffet. (Calculating a safe stacking height becomes a real issue.) Well, one Lawrence engineering firm is on the move. Bartlett & West is moving out of its Downtown Lawrence offices at 628 Vt. and into space in the Intrust Bank building at 544 Columbia, which is really right near Sixth and Lawrence Avenue. Bartlett & West is taking space previously occupied by Kansas Secured Title, which several months ago moved into space at the Orchards Corner shopping center at Bob Billings and Kasold. Joe Caldwell, location manager for Topeka-based Bartlett & West, said the move is partially designed to give the company more space to expand. The Lawrence office will have 15 employees, up one from its previous totals. The company hopes to move by the end of the month. No word yet on whether a new tenant has been found for the 628 Vt. space, which is the former offices of Gene Fritzel Construction.

• If you like shiny, red fire engines, you’ll like tonight’s Lawrence City Commission meeting. Commissioners are scheduled to get the ball rolling on buying a nearly $850,000 Pierce fire engine. It actually will replace two vehicles — a 1994 quint that has about 10,000 engine hours on it and a 1996 hazardous materials vehicle that has only 1,228 engine hours on it but is facing other mechanical problems and has become outdated from a technology standpoint. The city plans to use collections from the 2008 infrastructure sales tax and other cash reserves to pay for about $500,000 of the engine’s purchase price. The city will take out new 12-year debt to fund the remaining $350,000. Commissioners meet at 6:35 p.m. today at City Hall.

• Plans to move and renovate the old Varsity House at 1043 Ind. St. have kind of been moved to the junior varsity portion of the city’s agenda tonight. Plans to move the house are expected to be approved on the city’s consent agenda — the part that doesn’t receive any commission discussion. No one is complaining about that. The project previously has created plenty of discussion. The Lawrence Preservation Alliance had objected to plans to move the Varsity House off its corner location to make way for a complex containing about 50 apartments. But as we previously reported, a late-compromise emerged. The development group, led by Lawrence businessman Thomas Fritzel, has agreed to move the house closer to the corner. That will still give developers enough room to build the apartment complex, which is expected to be a unique one for the Oread neighborhood because it will include underground parking. City commissioners at their meting tonight are set to approve the rezoning and preliminary development plan for the project. The project still has a few design tweaks that will have to be made to satisfy the Architectural Review Committee of the Historic Resources Commission, but Tuesday’s approvals should be the last major ones needed to ensure the start of the multi-million dollar project.