Way back, many moons ago, like November 2005, I had stumbled upon BuddhaBA, a pan-asian spot that,…read morewhile never having the quality or variety of fare that I later found at Captain Cook (no longer open) or Cantina Sunae (not open at the time), always had a classy elegance about it, and I particularly liked the tea garden for after lunch sipping. Sadly, it closed last year, it had been limping along for awhile. It sat vacant for a bit, and then suddenly, about two months ago, underwent a rapid renovation and flung its doors open as Yüt, in Barrio Chino.
While still pretty, it's not near as elegant as it used to be - they've gone for more booths than tables, and for soft, neutral colors. On their website, they tout that they are a truly classic Taiwanese restaurant. On their menu it says they're a Cantonese restaurant. And, about a third of the dishes are identified as Sichuan. So, a mix, like most Chinese spots here. The menu itself is interesting - it's a beautiful, photo-laden, spiral bound affair. Each dish has a letter rather than a price next to it. And on each table, there's a price card that tells you how much dishes with that letter cost. It's a little tedious to zip back and forth, though basically, the further along the letter in the alphabet, the higher the price. It's also smart on the restaurant's side for ease of changing prices - something that given the handwritten changes on the price card already noted, in the six weeks they've been open, they've already done at least once.
One of the best hot and sour soups we've encountered in BA. Packed with flavor and had a kick to it, and a really good texture. Most hot and sour soups we've had tend to have those wood ear or black mushrooms in them, this didn't, which was noted, but didn't take away from how good the soup was. A steal given that six of us split this, for 490 pesos.
A simple stir-fry of green beans and pork. Good flavors, it might have been better if the pork was a bit more distributed, given that it was ground pork - it was all in clumps. But other than that, we really liked this one. 390 pesos.
A little disappointing on the "super spicy" Sichuan beef dish. Almost no chili in it, and only maybe a couple of scattered szechuan peppercorns. The beef was a little chewy, too. Meh. 490 pesos.
Mixed reactions to this one. It was billed as crispy fried oysters, but turned out to be simply stir-fried oysters topped with a pile of "crunchy bits" of really crispy sort of tempura batter, peppers, and fermented black beans. I think some of the negative reaction was that we were all expecting individually battered and deep fried oysters, but that may simply be a bad translation of the Chinese dish. The flavors were great, the oysters were fresh. I personally loved the dish. Quite pricey at 880 pesos, though there were a good number of oysters on the plate, and they're not cheap here.
Oddly, the last dish to come out, we'd expected it first... I mean, dumplings. Good, but not anything special. Filled with a nice pork and chive filling, good wrappers, but a bit oily. 390 pesos for a dozen of them isn't bad though.
Add in a big bowl of rice (320 pesos, or individual ones at 80 pesos each, so we saved over getting six individual portions, and it was more than we ended up eating), and drinks, and it was still a pretty reasonable outing at 670 pesos apiece with tip, or around $11. Oh, and the tea garden is gone - replaced by Yüt Express, a quick eats and takeout counter - that I'll check out at some point to see how different the fare is there.
