Restaurant: You Kitchen
Location: 1402 E Valley Blvd, Alhambra, CA 91801. (626) 977-8088
Date: March 7, 2023
Cuisine: Cuisine dumplings
Rating: top notch dumplings
When my High School friend Mike comes to town (from Hawaii) we love to hit up new SGV Chinese places.
This dumpling specialist doesn’t even have a liquor license, so we went dry, but the dumplings were worth it — and the carb coma.
Short but sweet menu.
And some specials.
Still tasted awesome!
Very minimal interior, classic old school SGV.
Freezers full of frozen dumplings that can be purchased for home.
Dried beancurd salad. Mildly spicy with great texture but not a ton of flavor.
Spicy Wonton. These were probably the best spicy wonton I’ve ever had. The skins were thin, the filling delicious porky goodness, and the sauce a lovely blend of tangy, a touch numbing, and medium spicy.
Spicy Beef Tendon. One of those typical spicy braised sliced meat Chinese dishes. Excellent.
Boiled Chives, Egg, and Vermicelli Dumpling. A rare non pork classic boiled dumpling. Very nice and light.
Steamed XLB with pork. Excellent and deliciate XLB.
Steamed Pickled Cabbage and Pork Dumplings. These might have been my favorite because of the touch of crunch and acidity from the pickled cabbage.
Pan-fried Pork and Celery Dumplings. Great classic dumplings and you could taste the celery.
Moist Pan Fried Pork Buns. Slightly shrunken versions of the Shanghaiese buns with great pork filling. Still a bit doughy, but nicely cooked and better at this size.
Beef Roll. Great version of this. Smaller than some and light with a good bit of sweetness. That beef, sweet, and cilantro combo is excellent.
Preserved Pickled Shredded Pork Noodle Soup with hand-made Noodles. A nice bit of pickled crunch with a very mild and pleasant broth. The thick hand-cut noodles were excellent.
Bowl ‘o’ soup.
Pan Fried Chive Egg Pillow. Like awesome Chinese chive and egg hot pockets!
Thousand Layer Pork Cake. Very nicely formed and cooked, although it was still pretty mild and doughy.
Sesame Chinese Pizza. Now this was interesting, like a giant version of the bun on the “Roger Moore” sandwich. It was very fluffy and lovely but way too bready for me in my current state.
Bready!
Uh, oh!
Overall, You Kitchen was really good. These were actually some of the best northern style dumplings I’ve had. Now I always like this sort of dumpling, even from a place like Northern Cafe, but these were in another league. They were smaller (which was good), light, delicate, with really tasty supposedly-no-msg fillings. Everything was perfectly cooked. This isn’t fancy food, but it is very very good. Interesting as well, for a tiny place where we saw one owner/employee, they had a very functional on the table ipad ordering and payment system!
A lot of dumplings!