Restaurant Review: Yummy Café

Turn left at the smiling cat

By: Bill Kohlhaase
Published online: Friday, August 24, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

There’s a beckoning, mechanical cat no more than a foot tall — it’s called Maneki Neko — that waves you into Yummy Café from its perch on a stand just past the entrance. (Maneki Neko is a Japanese invention but is popular among the Chinese.) Familiar to Pokémon fans, the smiling gold kitty with its swinging metronome arm welcomes patrons into an eclectic dining room.

The avocado-colored block wall behind Maneki Neko sports colorful Southwestern art, as does the opposite wall, where a yellow backdrop with swirling bronze orbs, something like a van Gogh sky, is crowded with more bright landscapes. Two large paintings, one depicting the Great Wall, the other showing a mother carrying a child in front of a pagoda, are showcased against a glass partition that separates a private dining room from the main one. There’s a display of ink-and-brush “zodiac animals” on a low divider. If it weren’t for the booths and tables, the Tsingtao promotional paper lanterns hung high overhead, and that plump, perpetually welcoming feline, you might think you were in some kind of art gallery.

Art isn’t foreign to Santa Fe dining establishments. But it’s a bit different to see so much of it in a Chinese restaurant. Yummy’s visual appeal — even the plates brought from the kitchen are artfully arranged — distinguishes it from other local Chinese cafés. Its name might suggest a yum-cha-style teahouse serving dim sum, but that’s not what it is. Yummy serves the usual array of Americanized Chinese favorites like those found at other Chinese spots in town. At Yummy, noodle dishes, Hunan and Szechuan entrees, and stir-fry dishes are all cleanly prepared, mildly flavored (unless you ask them to up the heat), and disappointing only in their occasional blandness.

When trying new Chinese restaurants, I look for signature dishes, items that other restaurants don’t serve, and hope for the best. Yummy has one that seems unlikely on the page — shrimp with mayonnaise — but is a winner at the table. Crisp shrimp are coated with a tangy mayo sauce that gives them a slightly oily glisten. The sauce goes surprisingly well with the pineapple the shrimp rest on — it makes the sweet-and-sour fruit come alive. Gold coin beef is a sort of Chinese quesadilla, shredded beef in a gentle brown sauce served over green-onion pancakes. We didn’t ask for it to be served spicy, and despite the Szechuan description and the hot and spicy symbol, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a bad dish, but it’s not a winner. The royal seafood pot — scallops, shrimp, calamari, and vegetables in a thick white-wine sauce — was equally nondescript (it’s also available with a spicy curry sauce).

Most everything else we ordered was nicely prepared but also undistinguished. Thick chow fun noodles were chewy but unimpressively sauced. Fried rice Singapore style wasn’t greasy and held just enough meat bits and vegetables to make it attractive. The beef skewers dipped in plum sauce were fine, the crabmeat cheese Rangoon heavy on cream cheese but light on crab flavor. Paper-wrapped chicken, ground and nicely spiced, put the rest of the Bo Bo platter selection to shame. Hot-and-sour soup was neither hot nor sour enough for our taste. Orange chicken was well done, the chicken just right, the sauce bright but without heat (again, we didn’t request that it be spicy).

A lunch special of kung pao chicken was short on pow despite the red chile in the thin sauce. But the vegetables were crisp and fresh, and the presentation — on a lacquered compartmentalized tray with a ramekin of white rice decorated with black sesame seeds, a won ton, and an egg roll — was beautifully conscientious.

Our servers never asked how hot we’d like our spicy items, and we wished afterward that they had. Otherwise, the service is prompt and courteous. Once when we ordered a tofu dish, our server let us know, just in case we were vegetarians, that the accompanying won ton held a bit of meat; unnecessary in our case, but considerate nonetheless.

That meal was the best we had at Yummy, the broth of the egg-drop corn soup rich and flavorful, the broccoli not overcooked, the tofu perfectly fried, and the garlic sauce nicely hot, just the way we’d asked for it to be. The experience put us in such good spirits that when we were leaving, we waved back at the beckoning kitty.