Yu S.
Yelp
I am not a vegetarian at all, but as a foodie, I actually love vegetarian restaurants. Yodelin is no exception. A lot of cooking centers around using whatever meat as a crutch, sucking away creativity and limiting use of ingredients. Taking away that crutch forces you to invent better food.
Ooohh, oh god, I can feel it coming. This 'bout to be a super long review with so many of my food pet peeves.
*slow inhale/exhale*
*shuffles note cards*
Let me tell you a story. My dad and stepmom are professionals at finding good Chinese restaurants. If I'm visiting and we're going to hot pot, I just know it's gonna be one of the most bangin' spicy hot pot stops in the area. However, if we're in a situation where we want to find the best western food, they are at a loss. Therefore, it was up to meeeee to find something good in Leavenworth.
"Something good" is a very vague standard, so if I had to identify something more specific: 1) Needs to be healthy. Food should actually have a wide assortment of vegetables. 2) Food needs to have more flavor. We can eat extremely spicy food and prefer a lot of seasoning and umami. Often, European restaurants that have a decent rating will still seem bland to us. Based on these criteria, I searched the Internet in this area and found a few top candidates. This is first up.
I am happy to report that while it wasn't perfect, they were actually impressed. Our favorite was probably the salmon rice bowl. The salmon is saucy and soft, but not too soft, perfectly cooked. Despite the plethora of veggies, there's virtually no lettuce anywhere. Instead you've got arugula(?), kale mix, radish, red cabbage, cucumber, avocado, cilantro, etc., so much cilantro. God I love cilantro. I judge rice bowls by their overall harmony also, like a Japanese donburi. Even then, I feel like this passes. The eggs add extra necessary umami. The cucumbers add extra necessary moisture. Everything here fits nicely.
In comparison, we felt like the noodle soups fell a tad short. The overall quality was excellent and the flavor of the broth was pointed in a good direction, but the strength of the umami was lacking. I get it though; they have to cook for their customer base. There's no way they could make their curry Yodelin broth as spicy as I'd want it and not have half of their customers running towards the restroom. Similarly, the chicken broth has a stronger umami than your average American chicken noodle soup, but.....we still found it to be weak. The chicken leg and cod we added were excellent though. The chicken was soft, juicy, and flavorful. The udon noodles themselves were fine.
I love the basil in the banh mi. But.....I'd kind of rather just have a banh mi at a legit Vietnamese place with sliced meat and jalapeños. This bacon was good, but I don't feel like it fits this sandwich very well.
The waiter recommended the broccoli appetizer, and we did not order that because it obviously sucks. Who wants to eat broccoli by itself? That's lame.
I asked for the garlic bread to be served with the other food because eating bread by itself before eating everything else is also lame. Bread should be eaten with soup, pasta, etc. I dipped my garlic bread into the broth because that is objectively a better way to eat it. From the way it's presented, I feel like the restaurant half expects me to chomp through the bread by itself. This might sound psychotic, but I find that annoying. Aside from that, I also found it too hard and thin as well as being an unwieldy shape for garlic bread. I like having larger, softer garlic bread cut into smaller segments and don't really approve of this. Y'all are lucky I'm not subtracting a star for this sad bread.
With all my complaints, it might seem strange that I'm still giving this five stars. But we did like it a lot. And....maybe I am being too nice again. But it's too late, I've already decided.
Five stars.