YooYee

I had asked our Movie Night friends to go to YooYee with us recently - not just because one of them is Asian - and though the holidays interfered some, we made our way up there this week. When they first asked me where it was, I said Chinatown, which was wrong, but the odds were decently in my favor. It is at the opposite end of the city, in fact, a mere 10 miles from QXY if you are familiar and looking to orient yourself. As we were heading there, they also asked me how I found the place, and rather than lie that time, I admitted I couldn't remember. About two minutes after walking in, I saw the Infatuation Best New Restaurant 2025 trophy on their counter and figured that must have been it. More on that later. This is somehow the second restaurant I have been to this year in a matter of weeks where I have commentary about the experience before even sitting down to eat. I genuinely do not expect this to continue, but here we are.

It is a small restaurant, and they don't take reservations. I spent a few minutes making sure that was the case, then realized that it shouldn't be too difficult to get a table for four on a Tuesday night either way. Wrong again. When you walk in, you will look for someone to speak to about getting seated or putting your name on the waitlist. Don't do that. Next to the counter where you expect to see a person, there is a neat little tablet where you can enter your name and party size. Do that. Lucky for us, one of the four of us actually realized this, and while three of us stood around wondering why we hadn't been approached for a few minutes - and noticed someone sneaking past us to said tablet - our surroundings-aware guest reassured us that we were already on the list.

We arrived around 6:40pm and were fourth on the list for parties of three or four. I didn't count the tables, but I would say there were about 10, mostly tables seating four, a few tables for two, and one big round table seating six. We spent the 25 minutes waiting intensely watching every table of four to see how close they were to finishing and got excited when we saw to-go boxes come out to each one. We were all fairly hungry, and this was not helping, but what else were we to do.

To be abundantly clear, I have no issues with the tablet system, the waiting process, the time it took to get seated, or anything else generally surrounding the entrance to the restaurant itself, just with those two losers who couldn't be bothered to help keep everything in a free-flowing equilibrium. For your sake, just consider the current popularity of the restaurant, and note that the busiest window seemed to be just before we had arrived at 6:30pm until about 8:00pm. Imagine that.

I love Sichuan¹ food. I admit to being partial to the "comfort" foods, Dan Dan Noodles, Mapo Tofu, Wontons in Chili Oil Sauce, etc. in favor of the tripe, rabbit, or other more "exotic"² dishes, but generally speaking, I will eat nearly all of it, and it has to be near the top of my favorite food cultures. As such, Dan Dan Noodles and Wontons in Chili Oil Sauce featured in our order, alongside Chongqing Popcorn Chicken, Spicy Beef Chow Mein, Spicy Braised Beef Brisket Hand-Pulled Noodle Soup, Xinjiang Style Beef, and Sauteed String Beans. The future wife and I shared the dan dan noodles and the chow mein, our friends shared the beef brisket and the Xinjiang beef, and we all shared the chicken, beans, and wontons.

We might as well cover the "appetizers" first. The string beans and the wontons were great, and for that, YooYee gets a golf clap. If you have had Sichuan green beans, or really any green beans from an Asian restaurant, you know how good they tend to be, so it is hard to raise the bar here. The wontons are not too dissimilar. They rest in a bowl of chili oil, and they are wontons. Easy wins, and you just have to avoid fucking them up. Props to YooYee for avoiding that, I suppose.

Because it is my favorite Sichuan dish and this is my blog, the Dan Dan Noodles will get a bigger chunk of this review than may be fair. I have experienced a lot of inconsistency with regard to dan dan noodles across a number of different Sichuan restaurants. Some opt for a wider noodle than the seemingly more traditional round, thin noodle. Some opt for a creamier sauce, presumably using more sesame paste, or apparently even opting for peanut butter over the more traditional oil-forward sauce. In both cases, I prefer the more traditional version by a wide margin, and though still not preferred, YooYee was only guilty of the second crime. In every iteration I have had, the dish is better with a simple, oil-forward sauce. Chili oil, some soy sauce, some Chinkiang or black vinegar, Sichuan pepper, and a hint of sesame paste. Making the sauce creamier through the use of peanut butter - or even tahini god forbid - should not make anyone happier, and it annoys me that it must.

The Chongqing chicken was very good, though a bit underwhelming on the spice level, which appears to have been true of the beef noodle soup, as well. Direct quotes from our friends were, "I thought the hand-pulled noodle soup was very good..." and "spicy BNS (Beef Noodle Soup) was not spicy, but very good." The second quote comes from our resident Asian, which I only mention to legitimize complaints about the spice level. Come to think of it, my being White is probably a more relevant reference point for the lack of spice than her being Asian, but it's neither here nor there. I don't think this is just me, but when I go to an Asian restaurant, particularly a Sichuan restaurant, I want to be fairly concerned about or intimated by the spice level when mentioned.

Sichuanese spices are a bit different from ghost pepper or habanero or Indian spices or whatever. The build is slow, numbing, and tingly, and the sweat just starts coming out of your face and the tears out of your eyes, but you never really feel that uncomfortable, notably different from the "I can't breathe and my stomach feels like it's being ripped apart from the inside" feeling evoked by these other types of spiciness. So, neither the Chongqing chicken, which was listed with a pepper at the hottest part of their spice meter, nor the dish prefaced by "spicy" being particularly hot was a bit of a letdown. They weren't spicy enough, but they were both good.

Both of our friends felt the Xinjiang beef was tender but too cumin forward.

The beef chow mein was good, but it feels wrong to comment too much on that because I don't think it's particularly Sichuanese. I confirmed this by checking the Index of my "The Food of Sichuan" book by Fuschia Dunlop and saw no references to "chow mein" anywhere in the book. That said, YooYee advertises themselves as a "neighborhood favorite [that] masterfully reinvents classic dishes while staying true to authentic flavors...," and this dish seemed to fall in that range. Good Chinese food is not hard to come by, so veering from a focus on the primarily Sichuanese elements here just doesn't appeal to me.

The food was good, but I didn't experience all the hype that I apparently saw before going. I would opt for trying an array of other Sichuanese food in the city before I default to going back here. And I am personally incredibly biased against the dan dan noodles. I always feel a bit uneasy about judging a place like this without working my way through a larger portion of their menu, but that just isn't how any of this will ever work. Such is life.

Infatuation gives them an 8.7 rating, which is totally insane. The first sentence of their review suggests that the spice ranges from "this has a nice kick" to "I need water, stat," then later mentions the staff "zooming around, making sure everybody has water for emergency guzzling." We just didn't eat at the same restaurant. At one point toward the end of dinner, I asked my friend to pass me the water carafe and he apologized for not realizing it was by him the whole time.

Of note, it is BYOB, which we learned when I asked for a beer after we sat down. The Tai Nam Food Market around the corner does not sell beer either, which we also learned shortly after that. I love that these Asian restaurants opt for the BYOB experience over selling alcohol themselves, even if it is just a function of the ability to acquire the necessary liquor license. You don't want to go to these places and spend 100 USD for what typically amounts to being reasonably priced food just because you had a few beers. The ability to have beer with your dinner while maintaining the price-quality tradeoff is hugely valuable here.

I'll finish by acknowledging again that they represent themselves as a Chinese restaurant with an emphasis on Sichuan flavors, rather than maybe more aggressively as a Sichuanese restaurant. It is probably unfair to judge them as anything other than that, but refraining from doing so doesn't really change the above. I went in with a mindset focused on the Sichuan food and flavors, and all of the above should capture the mindset with which I left.

I'm off to Denver this weekend to watch Bo Nix dirt the ball 15 times in a 3 point win and generate more content for this blog. I'll post recipes and related for the dinner we are making tonight early next week. It will be like the dumb grilled cheese but the opposite.