My toxic trait is that I am a sucker for trying out new restaurants. When I first saw the announcement that Yeun Kyung was opening on North Road I immediately checked to see when I was free to go. Yeun Kyung soft opened on February 12th and they are already quite popular. I came by on Thursday (just a few days after their first day) and my wait for a table was about 30 minutes. The space is beautiful – lots of natural wood and ambient lighting. Yeun Kyung bills themselves as a ‘luxury Chinese-Korean’ restaurant, and I was curious to see what made it ‘luxurious’. In addition to the staples of Jjampong, Jajangmyun and Tangsuyuk they have lots of seafood based dishes. Check out my full review of Yeun Kyung Korean Chinese below.
Yeun Kyung Korean Chinese – Combo A
All the tables are equipped with an iPad for convenient ordering. I believe they have paper versions if you ask for it. On our visit we went with Combo A. This combo is $53 and includes Jajangmyeon, Jjampong and Tangsuyuk. Since the restaurant is newly opened, I’m sure they’re working through a lot of processes, but the wait time for food was quite long. It took about 40 minutes for the Tangsuyuk to arrive and another 25 minutes for the noodles to arrive.
The Tangsuyuk on it’s own is $32 so we figured the combo was a better deal because the Jjangmyeon is $11 and the Jjampong is $15. So overall it’s a savings of $5. The dish itself was very large. There was lots of crispy pieces of pork, but the dish could have been hotter. It feels like they fried up an enormous batch once they got enough orders and then portioned it out accordingly. The flavour was good though!
The Jajangmyeon was fairly standard and nothing to really write home about. The noodles were a little softer than I’d like.
The Jjampong was also fine and I prefer it over the Jajangmyeon. There was plenty of seafood in the dish (a couple mussels, a few prawns and lot of squid pieces) and the soup packs a nice spicy punch.
Worth a Try?
Overall the food was fine, but the wait times makes it not really worth a revisit for me. The service was nice, and they did ask if we enjoyed the food a few times. They were pretty busy though and our teapot had black bean sauce all over the lid (which the staff did not notice). So for the ‘elevated’ expereince they’re going for, its small things like this that make it miss the mark. For the exact same combo I prefer going to Bbong just further down the street. This place is super busy though right now, so maybe it’s just me that doesn’t see the hype. All their speciality dishes (and I’m assuming the luxury portion of the menu) starts at around $30+. If you’re in the area and it’s not too busy, it’s worth trying out.
Yeun Kyung Korean Chinese
Address: 4333 North Rd, Burnaby, BC V3N 4N4
Website: https://www.instagram.com/yeunkyung_yvr/