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2014-09-15
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This restaurant has moved. It is now at 30 Man Yuen St., which is close to its original address (cross Ferry St., go two blocks south to Man Yuen, turn right and walk down past the 7/11 to the new location-- it has a red exterior with a big black sign-- photos of the exterior appear in the Chinese reviews on this site.)It has also become 'a thing' now that it won best regional Chinese cuisine from Timeout HK, and there are a surprising number of Western/ expat people eating there. The menu has E
It has also become 'a thing' now that it won best regional Chinese cuisine from Timeout HK, and there are a surprising number of Western/ expat people eating there. The menu has English and the servers speak great English. The beer is Tsingtao and Blue Girl.
If you're trying to find it online, it is often Romanized "Yau Yuan Xiao Jui" and though OpenRice lists the cuisine as "Shanxi" it is actually from "Shaanxi" the next province over. Don't worry, both provinces like wheat products and red meat.
I can't recall precisely what this bread packets are called, being as someone else at the table was ordering, but they had beef and noodles and veggies in them. They came out piping hot, stuffed full of goodies, and were pretty tasty on the whole. B+
The mutton dumplings were pretty good, but about exactly what you'd expect. The dumpling skin was nicely cooked: not too chewy but not overcooked either, and there was an appropriate dumpling-thickness-to-filling-amount ratio. Good, but nothing special. B
Everyone at the table was wild about this cucumber dish. I know it's just cucumbers, but the sauce was very flavorful and... new, unlike any sauce I'd had before. It might've had some slight peanut flavor, but there was a wide variety of things going on, and I'd recommend you try it. Excellent, A
My wife got the biang biang noodles with spare ribs. I'll tell you about the noodles below.
I got the noodles with chive and pork dumplings. I wanted the dumplings with dill in them, but apparently it's not the season for it. The biang biang noodle itself is one long, flat, chewy flour noodle. At dinner, two friends of mine straightforwardly disagreed on whether the noodles were good, but I thought they were both insane, because the one who liked the noodles didn't like angel hair pasta or rice vermicelli, and the one who didn't like them didn't like any flat chewy noodle. The truth is that all noodles are good, silly pants.
It's what you do to the noodles that matters. At YYST/ YYXJ, the noodles are smothered in a sweet, extremely salty, chili-vinegar sauce. I can see not liking it: it is very salty, it's sweeter than Westerners typically go for with their savory dishes, and even though we got "big spicy," it wasn't all that spicy. Additionally, my favorite chewy flat noodles have a lot of smokiness imparted from the wok (wok hei) and that's not going on here at all.
Still, I'm going to have to say that at the end of the day, I loved it. The giant one-noodle-in-your-bowl thing was new and different from anything I'd had before. And a dish made out of dumplings AND noodles? It can't be passed up. I would take someone who was visiting Hong Kong to this place (obviously after they'd tried the local stuff) and the only thing I regret is that it's not spicy. I would even come back, because the menu is extensive and has lots of different types of noodle dishes and, as I say, all noodles are good.
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