Joy Yee’s Noodles
521 Davis Street, Evanston IL; Phone 847-733-1900
Date of Review: September, 2007
There are currently 4 different Joy Yee’s locations in the Chicagoland area. They have locations in Naperville, Chinatown and University Village near the UIC campus. My review focuses on the Joy Yee’s located in Evanston since I frequent this spot most often. That said, this review is applicable to any Joy Yee’s restaurant.
All of the locations have a similar setup and menu with a small restaurant with many tables close together. They can easily push the tables together to accommodate a large party or separate them for a party for two. This is a very casual family friendly place and is a great place for large parties. The servers are attentive and expect that your food will arrive quickly. The servers work the whole restaurant so the person serving you may be a different person than the one who seated you or took your order.
Instead of attempting to describe every dish I have tried, I will give a recap of a few that are fresh in my mind. Their menu is huge with soups, noodle soups, and one pot rice and noodle dishes featuring seafood, chicken, beef and pork. This Pan Asian restaurant features dishes from a variety of Asian countries including Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Korea, Japan and China.
For appetizers, the chicken lettuce wraps (also available with pork or beef) are excellent. A healthy size platter that could easily serve as an appetizer for 4 of flavored chicken with onions and vegetables and quite a few lettuce leaves arrives on your table. We made wrap after tasty wrap and never even finished the appetizer because our entrees arrived and forced our attention to drift in another direction. Another good bet for an appetizer is the Japanese seaweed salad. It is a refreshing and tasty way to start a meal.
For entrees, the Korean Kimchi spicy scallop is served in an earthenware pot. It is full of large scallops, kimchi (marinated spicy cabbage), onions and other vegetables in a spicy Korean hot paste based sauce that has a hint of sweetness to it. The portion was too large for me to finish but the dish had just the right amount of spice for me and was loaded with flavor. It was served with a cup of rice that you can dump right into the pot. The Malaysian style seafood baked rice is an assortment of shrimp, scallops, squid and fish cooked together in sweet and spicy sauce with rice and is served in a bamboo pot. Heading back to Korea, the Korean BBQ short ribs are flavorful as the sweet sesame oil and scallion infused marinade makes for one scrumptious bite after another.
Joy Yee’s has a great variety of fresh fruit freezes with or without tapioca pearls floating at the bottom of your drink. The juice bar located at the back of the restaurant has an array of fresh fruits from mango to papaya to strawberry or banana. You can also get a red bean freeze or have one with a fruit that is common to some part of Asia like jackfruit, lychee or dragon fruit.
Joy Yee’s offers decent food great value with only a few items over $10 or $11. You can get many seafood dishes for under $12. On my last visit, we had 1 appetizer, 2 entrees and nothing to drink. Our total bill was $42 with tax and tip. The portions are large and you are likely to walk out with a take home bag.
