Yuma: Jeannie Wah’s Chinese & American Bistro

It's ed again, over in Yuma, not Kirk or Cathy. You are warned.

This old school Yuma Chinese restaurant has closed.

Shortly after I moved to Yuma, I decided to try every Chinese restaurant in town. It wasn't that hard — there weren't that many. Several old time Yumans recommended a Cantonese steakhouse named Gene's. It was the oldest Asian eatery in town.

So I stopped by one lunchtime and ordered a lunch special: chicken chow mein. What I was served looked a lot like this:

As soon as I began eating, I flashed back to my small town childhood and the "country and western" Chinese restaurant that was my parents' favorite in the 1950s and 60s. Every thing seemed exactly the same, from the combination of vegetables down to the predominant flavor of American soy sauce.

And like the memory from my childhood, this chicken and vegetable melange topped a thick pile of crunchy noodles, just like you could get out of the can:

For me, this flashback was not the resurrection of a pleasant memory, though to be fair, I should mention some friends who moved to Arizona from Boston and are so happy to find these old-school dishes that taste "just like the Cantonese food back in Massachusetts." In any case, Gene's was never my favorite, and I considered it a typical and ordinary ABCDE (Kirk's coinage: American Born Chinese Dining Establishment).

Gene's no longer exists, but the friendly woman who was its last manager has recently opened a new dining establishment, Jeannie Wah's Chinese & American  Bistro:

She has a tough task in this economy, but she is trying to attract new customers with new dishes while still satisfying the old customers from Gene's with American food, snickerdoodles, and dishes like that old-school chicken chow mein ($8.50). 

New note: I must say that the version of the chicken chow mein at Jeannie Wah's is better than the old version for 3 reasons. 1. The soy sauce is real soy sauce – not a complex flavor, but not bad either. 2. The Chinese greens mixed with the bean sprouts add a slight balancing touch of bitterness that works well in the dish. 3. The noodles are fried on premises and have real flavor and real crunch.

On my first visit to the very nicely decorated new eatery, I got lucky and ordered one of the lunch specials, the Wah's Up Today Noodle Bowl ($7):

This was really good, much better than any picture can convey. The broth was densely flavorful and rich. The chicken and barbecued pork were adequate as were the plentiful Chinese cabbage pieces and chopped Chinese mushrooms. The real highlight of the dish, even better than the outstanding stock, were the noodles. They had a perfect chew to them, with great mouthfeel and good flavor.

In fact, noodles seem to be one of the strong points of the restaurant. I recently ordered Gene's Cantonese Panfried Noodles ($11) to go:

Again the noodles were toothsome and flavorful. Notice the plentiful wok hay. The vegetable selection was also good. In addition to the usual suspects, there were sugar pea pods and plentiful crunchy baby corncobs. The only bummer in the entire dish were the shrimps. While their flavor was unexceptional, I never realized that it was possible to cook a shrimp to the point where it was as tough as sirloin steak. As tough as it is to believe this, that's how tough those shrimps were.

I also have picked up their version of Kung Pao chicken ($9.50):

 

The dish was good. I appreciated the plentiful topping of cashews, and the amount of chicken was generous as well. Providing texture and flavor contrast were more baby corns, onions, red bell peppers, and some type of mildly spicy chopped green pepper. As the picture shows, this dish was not super picante, but the red chili flakes and the chopped green chilies did provide a one/two capsicum punch.

Perhaps because of my central European roots, I love various combinations of pork and cabbage. At Jeannie Wah's, I was pleased to see double cooked pork on the menu ($8.50). And of course, I ordered it on one of my first visits to the restaurant:

The version here is very basic, but certainly adequate. Compared to the dish at Mandarin Palace (my favorite version in town), this one was very simple — just cabbage, barbecued pork, and chili flakes. The pork here also lacked the fatty richness that makes the rendition at Mandarin Palace so outstanding. Nonetheless, I could eat this again happily.

I'm glad that this restaurant opened. This is such a wonderful change from the Chinese buffets that dominated the Asian food scene here in Yuma just three or four years ago. Prices seem fair, and portions are generous. Istill need to explore more of the noodle dishes here, as they seem to be a real strength of the place. Nonetheless, Jeannie Wah's is not going to replace Yummy Yummy as my favorite local Cantonese place, nor does the menu offer the diversity of Mandarin Palace. Still, it fills a very flavorful niche out here in the desert.

Jeannie Wah's Chinese and American Bistro, 1360 4th Ave (actually off 14th St close to 5th Ave), Yuma AZ, 928-783-0080