A note on the words: yum cha is the Cantonese custom of taking tea with a run of small dim sum dishes, so a “yum cha lunch” means a set built out of those little plates. Dim sum are the steamed, fried and rolled bites themselves, usually served a couple to a bamboo basket; shumai is one of them, an open-topped pork dumpling, and here it is made with glutinous rice. Mapo tofu is cubes of tofu simmered with ground meat in a red, chili-oiled sauce, and Sichuan pepper (huajiao) is the citrusy husk that leaves your lips buzzing rather than burning. Dan dan noodles are a Sichuan noodle dish with a sesame-and-chili sauce; “soupless” means the sauce is tossed through the noodles instead of poured over them as broth. Yodare-dori is poached chicken under a chili-and-sesame dressing — the name means “drool chicken.” Edamame are young soybeans boiled in the pod. Winter melon is a large, mild gourd that goes clear and soft in soup. Petits fours are the tiny sweets served at the end of a meal.
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Sichuan Restaurant Chin Yokohama on Tabelog (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
Hey, this is Hangover Meshi. This time an event took me out to Minatomirai in Yokohama. I thought I’d grab a quick bite before the event started, so I headed to the Yokohama Bay Hotel Tokyu. There are a few places in here I’ve wanted to try for a while and had my eye on. This time it was one of them: “Sichuan Restaurant Chin.” This is the restaurant of Kentaro, son of Chen Kenichi of Shisen Hanten! I’ve been wanting to come once. So I timed it for right after opening and walked in.
First one in! Or so I thought — there was already one party ahead of me. They let me choose whether I wanted a table by the window or one further in, so I took the window.
Yum cha lunch (weekdays only): 4,500 yen
Huang He lunch course: 6,500 yen
Chang Jiang lunch: 10,200 yen
Thank You Lunch (weekdays only): 3,900 yen
Looks like there are cheaper sets on weekdays only. I wondered what the difference was against the yum cha set, so I looked at what each one contains: what the Thank You set lacks is the Peking duck and the shrimp chili. I want both of those! So this time I went with the weekday-only yum cha set.
It was hot out, so I ordered an iced oolong tea too!
On the left, an appetizer of octopus dressed in scallion oil, and edamame with a little prickle of heat to them.
This soup, though — unbelievably good, lol
The dried shrimp give off a really fine stock. A luxurious Chinese soup! Only proper Chinese cooking gets a flavor like this out of it. It tastes expensive! And it’s delicious. I could drink it all day.
On the right is the scallop dim sum, on the left the glutinous-rice shumai. There’s something under the steamer basket, and it keeps hissing steam out the whole time. Leave it a while and it’s still piping hot! You burn your mouth a bit as you eat, but the savory juices come flooding out — hot, and good.
Is the surface grilled, maybe? A crisp Peking duck.
You don’t often see Peking duck in this shape. Put like this, it does feel like a piece of dim sum. Eating it, there’s meat in there along with the skin. Yep, good.
Shrimp chili! This is a Sichuan place, so of course it’s a proper-looking shrimp chili. Loaded with chili oil, and the sauce alone is outstanding. The shrimp themselves are big and springy. You cut them up with a knife and fork — a refined way to go about it. The salad is dressed with MCT oil, so it feels healthy too. I think you’re meant to wipe up the last of that sauce with the steamed bun, but I was starting to get full ^^;
For the main you can choose freely from mapo tofu, soupless dan dan noodles, yodare-dori chicken and shrimp cold noodles, jade cold noodles with chicken, rice with shark fin in thick sauce (2,500 yen extra), and a whole shark fin with soup noodles (2,500 yen extra)! Well, it was always going to be the mapo tofu, so I played it safe and chose that — and I think that was the right call. A very good-looking mapo tofu. I did ask them to go a little light on the rice, by the way.
This mapo tofu is so good. It is spicy, sure, but — how to put it — the heat is definitely there and yet it isn’t too much, just the right level, with the fragrance of Sichuan pepper on top of it. Part of it must be that the base broth is so good, but the depth of flavor is remarkable.
I was getting full, but I polished it off.
And then, just when I’d let my guard down, three desserts! And tea.
Mango pudding, lemon sherbet, and mango in something like a waffle-batter shell.
All of them clean and pleasantly sweet without going too far — easy desserts to finish. Delicious.
Well now, I went with the yum cha set and it turned out to be quite a lot of food. Hearty, and satisfying.
So, one more place off my list! It really is the restaurant of the son who carries on from Chen Kenichi. Every dish was carefully done and had a real sense of luxury to it, and all of it was good. The mapo tofu especially — the same is true at Shisen Hanten — is seriously delicious. Eating the mapo tofu here makes me want to go to Shisen Hanten as well. I might drop in again next time I’m in Yokohama.
Sichuan Restaurant Chin Yokohama (Chinese / Minatomirai Station, Bashamichi Station, Sakuragicho Station)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.5
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
