Ume Yummy
2615 Pembina Hwy
204-615-0888
June, 2020
What an odd name for a restaurant! How's it pronounced?
Uhmmie yummy? Oohmie yummy? You-mie yummy? They spelt “yummy” the English
way, maybe the “e” of Ume is not pronounced?
So Ooom Yummy? Ewmmm Yummy? Ummuh Yummy?
Maybe it’s Oh My Yummy? And what
kind of food does Ume Yummy serve? I assume it's Chinese since it turned up on
my search for Chinese food.
For quite a few years, Fort Garry, south Pembina Highway IS
the place to go for the city's best Chinese food. With the influx of Chinese
students attending the UofM, the area sprouted dozens of authentic, delicious
and well-priced establishments. Sadly and recently, the saturation of the area
means that competitors have entered the market offering inferior food. For
years, every restaurant in the area offered superior Chinese but now, it's a
bit of a hit-and-miss, with some places continuing to serve the best Chinese
around, while others barely get a passing grade. Even some of the long-standing places seem to
drop quality of their output.
The typical Chinese
menu offers 200+ dishes--you know the routine: take your ingredients
(shrimp/beef/barbecued pork/tofu/seafood), next, your vegetables
(mushrooms/peppers/chop suey/broccoli/snow peas), then your starch (rice/chow
mein/chow fun/Shanghai noodles) and milk out every combination of the three
factors. It'd be so much easier if they just listed three columns and told you
to pick one from each. Well, Ume made it even easier than that: they severely
limited the choices so their entire menu only offers 15 mains in total. In
fact, the diminutive menu doesn't offer the combinations I want; I guess
there's a reason why Chinese menus feature hundreds of choices. That’s fine—I’m happy to try what they offer.
We ordered from Ume two days ago; checking the delivery site
now, the menu already underwent a complete overhaul. The entire chicken section is gone, replaced
by a new section called Oven Baked Rice.
Perhaps their in-house menu indeed features hundreds of dishes and only
a select few sees the delivery rotation.
We start with a fan-favourite Sweet & Sour Chicken
Balls. One of the easiest dishes for
restaurants to scrimp on ingredients, you can make the balls huge with barely a
morsel of meat inside. Simply pump up
the batter with baking powder and the dough rises, leaving a speck of chicken
with a huge vacuum inside the ball. I’m
sure you’ve experienced it where you take a big bite out of a chicken ball only
to find that it’s a hollow shell? The
chicken ball bloats to the size of a muffin but the meat inside is the size of
a pea? Good restaurants avoid the
leavening agent so the size of the ball roughly equals the size of the meat
morsel. That’s what I expect: to take a bite into a chicken ball and get a
mouthful of chicken, not air. If I ever need
to go into a belching contest, I’d remember to eat hollow chicken balls to
swallow air.
Although ubiquitous to Chinese menus, S&S Chicken Balls
is also one of the most difficult dishes to make well. Most restaurants use white meat for their
chicken balls, and white meat dries very easily and quickly if you overcook it. Normally, if you put white meat into a sauce,
the sauce somewhat rehydrates the meat; however, with the fried breading
armour, there is no way for the moisture to penetrate the meat. Deep fried batter acts like a sponge, soaking
up moisture and holding it.
To cook the chicken, you need to fry the batter and the meat
inside the batter. Judging the doneness
of the meat can be very challenging since you can’t see it and you can’t press
it. An accomplished chef can easily
press down on their meat and know doneness; there is no way for them to squeeze
their balls to know if they’re ready. If
a restaurant errs, it wants to err on the side of overdone, rather than raw
chicken. Thus, you often see dry balls
on your dish.
Ume’s chicken balls fall short on a number of fronts. First, they commit the sin of cheapness by
serving us hollow balls—not all, but a considerable portion of them. The ones stuffed with meat indeed tasted
overcooked, sere and dry. Having dry
balls is just not fun for anyone.
Curiously, Ume cut the corners of the container (cut the
corners as in snip them off, not scrimp on materials). If you order deep fried foods, yes, you want
to food to be able to breathe for the dish to retain its fried crispiness. An enclosed container holds the humidity from
the heat and quickly turns the crunchy batter into a soggy mess. For Ume’s balls, why would you nip the corners
to let out the steam? Your sauce already
turned the balls into goo. All the
crispiness is already gone and the holes just allow the dish to get cold—and cold
balls is no fun either.
Along the same vein, have a look at the Deep-fried Fish
Fillet Curry on Rices [sic]. By itself,
the fish fillet looks nicely fried, just cooked, flakey and lightly
breaded. Then they take the fillet and
dunk it entirely into the curry sauce.
It’s the same old song but again, whatever was crispy is now drenched
into sauce. Accompanying the sauce, we
get cuts of red and green bell pepper.
Sadly, the chunks of pepper taste as mushy as the fish’s breading, well,
well overcooked.
Here’s a general piece of advice: Asians produce delicious curried dishes. With origins in India, where curry has oodles
of spices and flavours, it disseminated to surrounding areas and other
colonies. Most Indian curries feature
coconut, be it dried or milk. Whereas
coconut plays a supporting role in Indian curries, coconut milk has a
co-starring position with Thai curries.
The Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Pakistanis, the Japanese, and the
Sri Lankans are all well known for their curry dishes—and so are the
Chinese.
While most of Asia experiments extensively with curry
spices, China’s curries are the simplest, and simply the most boring. The standard is to take the usual dishes and
add curry powder—that’s it. Curried
fried rice is regular fried rice with a tablespoon of curry powder. The dish I’m eating is a simple white sauce
blended with mild curry powder. Without
supporting actors, curry powder by itself can taste bland—and that’s I have
here. Under-salted, under-spiced, and
under-flavoured, I would stay away from this dish (and stay away from Chinese
curry in general—there is too much great curry in the world to eat shitty
curry).
By contrast, the Beef Fried Rice oozes with flavour, nicely
seasoned and nicely spiced. Bad fried
rice tastes like bland white rice, coloured with soy. Some restaurants blast the coloured rice with
MSG, hoping to add a much-needed dimension.
Not so here—the flavour stands on its own without overusing the sodium.
Now the downside: I
had to check the order to ensure I ordered Beef Fried Rice and not plain fried
rice. Look at the photo—can you see the
beef? Neither can I! And I’m poking at it with a fork! Now look at this photo:
I inserted some areas to show you what they consider cuts of
beef. Yes, that’s it—that’s all there is
to it. Those are the largest and only
pieces. Now look again at the
photo. What else do you see? Peas?
Anything else?
The answer is no, because there is nothing else—no onions,
no celery, no carrots, nothing. Folks,
this is just downright cheap. Tiny bits
of vegetables cost close to nothing but they add flavour, texture and colour to
a dish. Cheaping out on those ingredients
is stingy beyond the dreams of Scrooge.
The amount of beef in this beef dish is borderline fraud. Eating a poor-tasting dish makes me unhappy;
eating a cheapo, fraudulent dish makes me downright mad.
We finally get to the Fried Beef with Flat Rice Noodles
(chow fun), which is by far the best dish of this order.
As you can see, there are loads of big slices of beef, well
fried, moist, tender and flavourful. The
dish includes plenty of bean sprouts, crispy, mild and perfect to cut through
the richness of the sauce. Slices of
scallions add both colour and edge to the meal.
The noodles have plenty of taste, well beyond just soy, and
have soft, velvety texture. I prefer
most noodles al dente, except Chinese noodles.
You don’t want a bite on these noodles; you want them just to melt in
your mouth and they do. One hundred
percent authentic, eating this brings me to my childhood when dad would dish
this straight out of the wok into my plate. This is a top shelf rendition of beef chow fun.
I have high expectations for Fort Garry Chinese and I expect
the quality that comes with this chow fun.
Unfortunately, the other dishes barely register a passing grade. The chicken balls are no better than bargain
buffet balls; the curry dish is somewhat of a disaster; and the fried rice is
disgraceful.
As I said earlier, in the past, you cannot walk into a bad
Chinese establishment in Fort Garry; now there’s great, good and so-so. Ume Yummy wishes they could be so-so.
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Ray Yuen, Pit Master, Grill Master
Certified Kansas City Barbecue Society Judge - Badge #97736
Certified Steak Cook-off Association Judge - Badge #7788
Canadian Barbecue Society Member
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