John Huynh at 35 is a man with a menu for business success. Last year he opened three Vietnamese restaurants within three months and early this month opened his fourth of a small chain of Wayside Noodle eateries, this in El Dorado Hills’ Town Center.

His formula: take advantage of a soft commercial real estate market and find distressed properties, preferably former restaurants that failed but whose space has a kitchen and cooking equipment in place, sharply reducing move-in costs for Huynh.

The local Wayside Noodles is in the Theater Plaza food court in the former site of Maui Tacos, which went out of business late last year. Besides his lease, Huynh has spent little on fixing up the place, other than a little cleaning and “freshening.” It seats 65, plus 20 in the patio during warm weather.

It’s counter service — you order your food at the counter — and it features a new full menu, same as at the Wayside Noodles store in downtown Sacramento. Business has been so good in El Dorado Hills that Huynh soon added the expanded menu. His other noodle shops are in Roseville and Natomas.

“El Dorado Hills has been a whole new population,” he said. “I figured the movie theater would attract people to come here to eat. It’s been overwhelming. It’s something El Dorado Hills has been waiting for, something different. We’re the first Vietnamese restaurant in town.”

A busy lunch crowd draws heavily from employees at Blue Shield and Intel Corp. in Folsom. Prices for lunch and dinner are in the $5.50 to $8.50 range.

“Fresh, cheap and fast” is how Huynh describes his restaurants. “In this economy, a lot of places closed because of high prices. You have to do something for the market. Everybody wants something good and to pay a decent price and get full and satisfied.”

But he insists his restaurants aren’t serving Vietnamese “fast food.” Rather, he terms it “more like modernized Vietnamese food, with a little bit of a fusion mix. There’s everything you will find in a Vietnamese restaurant, but cleaner and more fast-paced and with a healthier environment and ingredients,” he said. He terms the food “about 75 percent authentic.”

He has applied for a beverage license and expects to be serving beer and wine within a few months.

Huynh is a registered nurse, earning a degree at California State University, Sacramento, but practiced only a year before “somehow” getting into the restaurant business and never going back. His wife, Theresa, is a co-owner of the small chain.

Her parents own about 20 Vietnamese restaurants, 10 of them Hoa Viet stores in Sacramento. That’s where Huynh made his entry into the business about 15 years ago. He said he’s self-financed and his and his wife’s ownership of the Waysides is totally separate from her parents and their business and the menus for the two chains are different.

Huynh, born in Vietnam but living in the United States 30 years, is “shooting” to open four more Wayside Noodle outlets this year, with his eyes on Lodi, Laguna, Southern California and the Bay Area, “wherever the market takes us,” possibly in a couple of months, after the El Dorado store has stabilized.

He’s confident in his expansion plans. “I think Vietnamese food in a couple of years will be as popular as Thai food and Japanese food,” he said.

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SHOP TALK

What: Wayside Noodles

Where: 208 Vine St., Suite 101

Owners: John and Theresa Huynh

Phone: (916) 939-1935

Online: waysidenoodles.com