Mei Mei, Roxy's Grilled Cheese, Triangle Coffee & Others Are Shipping Up to the Seaport

The folks behind Mei Mei alluded to potential expansion plans involving a shipping container kiosk earlier this year, and the company announced on Facebook today they're among the local vendors who will set up semi-permanent shop at the Innovation and Design Building.

Roxy's Grilled Cheese and Triangle Coffee have also shared their involvement on their respective social media pages, and Mei Mei said Jubali, Yankee Lobster Co., "and other cool folks" are headed for the shipping container smorgasbord, too.

The Innovation and Design Building is a mixed-use development on Drydock Avenue in the Seaport, housing a variety of innovation companies. Its landlord, Jamestown, was involved in adaptive reuse projects that created mixed-use projects, including food halls, at Chelsea Market in New York and Ponce City Market in Atlanta.

According to a term sheet for the Boston project, Jamestown will lease up to eight custom-built shipping containers, each about 160 square feet, along the northern edge of the office building.

Mei Mei is Eater Boston's reigning Restaurant of the Year. Its Seaport concept will be called Mei Mei By Design, and it will offer sandwiches, soups, and salads, according to today's Facebook post. In January, co-owner Andrew Li told Boston Magazine the then-unconfirmed project would feature a "low-prep menu." Hot dogs that surfaced at the restaurant and on the Mei Mei Street Kitchen food truck earlier this year were an experiment related to the potential expansion, and Li also said Sicilian-style pizza with Chinese takeout-inspired toppings could appear on the Seaport menu.

The shipping container mini-food hall will be located on the promenade near 21 Drydock Ave., according to Facebook comments from Triangle Coffee. Roxy's Grilled Cheese said on Facebook the shipping container kiosks could open this fall.

UPDATE, 9/8/15: Yankee Lobster Co.'s space could be a "test kitchen" of sorts, according to a recent job posting (which doesn't specify a location, so it's possible there is another location in the works). "It will have some of our favorite dishes from our current location while exploring new options and flavors that we might integrate into our regular menu," the posting reads. "This project will be a scratch kitchen with a rotating menu so our ideal candidate must be able to continuously come up with new and inventive, yet simple dishes."