The luxury Chinese restaurant will now deliver its signature dishes
Gordon Ramsay once named this Lancashire venue the ‘best Chinese restaurant in the UK’. It’s success lead head chef Victor Yu and his brother Vinnie to open a second place in Alderley Edge in 2016.
Yu’s style is posh Chinese – basically all your favourite dishes but made using more luxurious ingredients and refined cooking techniques served in a sleek venue with lots of polished dark wood and slick black lacquered finishings. Think chicken truffle sui mai, wok seared wagyu beef and salt and pepper chilli lobster.
Tubs of pre-prepared veg and sauce are all clearly labelled. Just identify which goes with what dish.
The original Copster Green restaurant, near Blackburn, is currently closed/offering take out because it’s in a Tier 3 area but the Alderley Edge restaurant falls within Tier 2 so is open for substantial meals and cocktails.
Either way, you can now enjoy the taste of Yu in your own home because team Yu has launched Yu to You, a new cook at home box with UK wide delivery.
There’s obviously nothing new about the Chinese takeaway, but the idea behind this box is that it delivers Yu’s signature dishes and throws in a bit of fun putting them together. There is a little bit of cooking to do but all the ingredients are prepped and clearly labelled. Just factor in that the preparation and cooking is as much a part of your evening’s entertainment as the eating, then you’ll be ok.
What do you get?
This box is designed to serve two, but you get loads of food; three starters (honey coated bamboo chicken, salt and pepper ribs, crispy prawn and lobster wonton), aromatic crispy duck, three main courses (crispy chilli chicken, black bean rib-eye, champagne miso cod) as well as Singapore noodles and Jasmine rice. Pudding is not included – but it’s unlikely you’ll find room for that anyway. Apparently you can arrange to have cocktails added to your box and I’m sure if you asked nicely (and pay for it), they would also include a bottle of wine or bubbly from their list.
What do you have to do?
Preparation is key. Read the instructions first and work out your timings because there are a lot of different dishes to prepare and various oven temperatures to manage. You need to set your timers if you want to stick to the instructions exactly – but if you bung the starters in for 15 minutes and then sit down to eat them first, that’s fine.
Bamboo chicken was delicious; having been steeped in an umami rich soy sauce based marinade and steamed in its bamboo leaf cocoon. The ribs reheated well and you get a little pot of salt and pepper mix to shake onto them before serving. Prawn and lobster wontons crisped up well in the oven and were much better quality than mass produced versions. A sweet chilli dip was provided but they were good enough without.
While you’re eating your starters, you need to whack the oven temperature up to high and heat the foil wrapped duck up for 25 minutes. The pancakes just need steaming or microwaving and all the usual bits and bobs (hoi sin sauce/cucumber/spring onion) are provided. When you open the foil an aromatic cloud of delicious smells burst forth while you shred the meat into a huge pile. Of course cooking in the foil means the duck will never be crispy, but it tastes great and there’s plenty of it.
Champagne miso cod is one of Yu’s signature dishes heavily influenced by the famous New York omakase restaurant, Nobu. There is usually a lot of advance preparation if you make this from scratch, but here it has all been done for you - just remove the fish from the bag and bake for 12 minutes. It’s light and healthy but with depth and a slight sweetness from the marinade.
While the cod is cooking, lay the coated chicken pieces on to a baking tray and heat in the oven at the same time, because there’s some work to do on the hob. Tubs of pre-prepared veg and sauce are all clearly labelled. Just identify which goes with what dish. Veg for the crispy chilli chicken needs softening in a wok before adding the sweet chilli sauce and reheating gently.
There’s a bit of faffery to be done with rolling an omelette and cutting into strips and stir-frying veg and noodles while you’re trying to sort out the beef dish, but the fact that I also had to keep stopping to take photos probably didn’t help.
Black bean ribeye is a particularly ‘restauranty’ dish with a slab of very high quality Ribble Valley raised beef that needed cutting into cubes before browning in a very hot wok. You then have to let it rest while you stir-fry the accompanying strips of onion and pepper and deglaze the pan with some shao shing rice wine.
Jasmine rice is the easiest thing to manage – just reheat in a microwave and fluff up the grains.
All in all, a lot of delicious, high quality food. Decent value and fun to put together – a long as you’re not in a rush to eat it all at once.
Yu offer collection from both Alderley Edge and Copster Green restaurants every Friday. They also offer nationwide delivery, which arrives on a Saturday morning.
Yu to You costs £65 per box and serves two. To order yours, email craig@yurestaurants.co.uk
Follow @yu_copstergreen and @yu_alderleyedge on Instagram
