Yummy Red Bowl Review - A New Richmond Stir Fry Concept Still Finding Its Way

It was wildly unexpected that this review would be finding its way on my schedule. Up until about fifteen minutes before I walked through its front doors, I had never heard of Yummy Red Bowl—a new Asian stir fry and sushi spot located in Merchants Walk Shopping Center off of Broad Street.

I got a very last minute invite to join my sister for lunch at Yummy Red Bowl. In actuality, I forced my own invite after she texted our family group chat about this new stir fry place she was walking into that was giving away a free sample bowl to any patrons who showed up between from 11am to noon that day. It was 11:42.

But free food is free food, and nobody is going to stop me from a good deal—certainly not the watchful, vigilant eyes of the Henrico County Police (because I drove a very respectable speed all the way to the restaurant, not weaving in and out of cars, sullying the honest name of Dodge Charger owners everywhere). I arrived with four minutes to spare.

Paintings and decor were stacked neatly against the foot of the wall near the front door, waiting to be arranged and hung. Packing boxes unopened at the host stand. It was certainly a restaurant well within the throes of checking things off their opening checklist.

I found my sister at a booth in the corner of the restaurant. I only had a few minutes to peruse the menu before our waitress greeted us at the table and escorted us to the stir fry station.

It’s a pretty straightforward concept that most people are basically familiar with from other stir fry or Mongolian BBQ restaurants. You have a bowl. You fill up the bowl with meats and veggies, noodles or rice, sauces and seasonings. Egg, even! Then you hand off the tray to the cook who dumps out the contents of your bowl on to a ripping hot grill. A few minutes later the bowl is brought back to you at your table. And then you eat.

This restaurant chose to make it a bit more ambiguous and less straightforward by giving you a card to fill out (that’s not the part that’s unambiguous—that part is typical so they know which table to bring it back to) with a choice of starch: the only options were white rice, fried rice (which was misspelled), and brown rice. But up at the bar there were also udon and ramen noodles available.

It’s a small complaint I suppose, but either give me all of the starch choices on the card and let me pick one to come with the bowl, or forget the card and put all the starches on the bar and let me fill my bowl with what I want. The latter includes the attractive option for the restaurant of taking up precious bowl real estate, which assuredly lowers costs. Either way, self service experiences with friction don’t do restaurants favors. So easy a caveman should be able to figure it out.

But this leads us to half the fun of a Mongolian restaurant: filling the bowl with the raw ingredients. There’s a technique to this—a skill one can train for, but so few master. I’m sure if you dig deep there’s forums on this topic alone: how to construct the biggest, baddest bang-for-your-buck bowl at a Mongolian BBQ restaurant.

One of the most awe-inspiring techniques I’ve ever seen employed is the creation of a retaining wall of broccoli on the outer rim of the bowl, standing straight up to give the bowl added height. Top scientists at NASA measured that this method can allow up to 40% more food in the bowl: a secret you didn’t hear from me.

Now I find that in my advanced years I’ve come to appreciate a well-balanced stir fry bowl more than my more savage teenage years where I measured the quality of my meal by the quantity of the meat included. So I opted for a well stacked but modest balance of different meats to veggies. And two whole eggs, because I’m a renegade!

Let’s be real for a second. It does not matter what you put in your bowl. And you’re going to put all kinds of different meats: in this restaurant’s case you have such wonderful, expansive choices as beef, and pork, and chicken thighs, and chicken, and carb (which I have to assume was supposed to say crab; typographical errors abound at Yummy Red Bowl!). There may be some variability in the sauce construction—you might opt for some spiciness from the chili oil or some sweet and tangy flavor profiles from things like dragon sauce. Regardless, ultimately your bowl is going to look almost indistinguishable from the rest of your table’s bowls.

The shortcoming of this cuisine is that the preparation of the food is at least secondary to the bowl which is already outsourced to you, the diner. All the ingredients in your bowl are dumped on to that grill and cooked through at the same time. Maybe the eggs and the sauce get added in different batches, but generally the bowl will come out looking like stir fry slop.

I want to be very clear about this: I am not saying that as a bad thing. Every time I get a Mongolian BBQ meal, I have the exact same thought, and every time I spend days afterwards thinking about how I want another one. It’s a carnal release of evolution and instinct in a single bowl, where everything tastes the same, and nothing is missed out on.

If you don’t believe me, look for yourself at my sister’s bowl versus mine. Indistinguishable.

At Yummy Red Bowl, they offer these stir fry bowls all you can eat for an additional $4. The bowl itself we were told is only $14, which in today’s food climate feels like an incredible deal. We were quite content with the one but it is good to know if I really wanted to pig out, that I could gameplan differently.

It is worth noting that this restaurant does have sushi and Korean fried chicken wings as second and third legs to the stir fry. We didn’t indulge in that, but it is there. In my mind, the appeal of this place—unless told otherwise—is going to be the AYCE stir fry station.

Yummy Red Bowl lives up to its namesake. The bowl delivered. And it’s red. The pricing is solid for the amount of food you get, and the gamesmanship of the bowl construction is always worth the price of admission.

I’m an optimist, however I’ve seen the story of ambitious places like this play out before. I hope they get some of the smaller things sorted out because those small things tend to snowball into bigger things, and then cost cutting happens and soon enough I’m reviewing a new restaurant concept by someone else in the same location. I really do not wish to see that. For my money, I’d like to be back, if not at least to keep my bowl building skills sharp.

Restaurant: Yummy Red Bowl

City: Richmond, VA

Cuisine: Stir Fry