Is it worth the hype? We tried Yuki House after social media blow up | Local Flavor

Believe it or not, there is one person in Northeast Ohio who loves snow.

In fact, she even named her restaurant and dog after the freezing cold element.

Yuki House owner Jeni Dalanay may have a fondness for the cold, but the Hawaiian-style hibachi and Thai cuisine she whips up will leave her customers warm and full.

The restaurant recently gained traction online after a complimentary post from Does It Suck?, a local Facebook page that reviews snacks, drinks and sometimes restaurants. Good thing too, since I likely wouldn’t have known of its existence otherwise.

Yuki House is tucked away next to Clayton’s Laundry in a small brick building at the six corners where Howe Avenue, Tallmadge Road and Brittain/Bailey Road meet. Since its opening in April, I’d sat at that light without a clue it was even there – something I now regret.

The inside of the eatery is in stark contrast to its outer shell, with splashes of color and floral elements on the front counter and an “Oh Boba Baby” mural in the main dining area.

But it is the food that made me wish I had known about Yuki House since the day of its opening.

On the menu at Yuki House

“What should I get to eat?”

It’s a loaded question coming from Cathryn, my old college roommate who accompanied me to Yuki House. In our friend group, she is well known for choosing the most out of pocket and unpleasant thing on any menu.

Example No. 1: She ordered a fruit flavor the first time I took her to Handel's Ice Cream (Handel's is a chocolate-only situation in my experience).

Example No. 2: She ordered Wasabi Shumai at Drunken Bento, our favorite Cincinnati sushi spot during college, without knowing what wasabi was.

Luckily, she deviated from her signature decision-making skills and got crab Rangoon ($5), steak hibachi with fried rice ($15) and a mango milk tea ($5) with tapioca pearls (75 cents).

At Yuki House, patrons can select the spice level of their hibachi. Cathryn said the medium spice level that she got was just enough heat to make the whole dish come together, but not too hot.

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For my drink, I had a Thai iced tea but quickly switched to green tea with peach flavoring after finding it a bit weak. Both were $5.

I also ordered Korean style garlic fried chicken ($15), which usually comes with white rice and macaroni salad, but I asked for two scoops of fried rice instead (an additional $3). The chicken had a great flavor and crunch, plus there was more than enough of it for one meal.

In addition to the chicken and rice, I asked for spring rolls ($5), summer rolls ($6) and hibachi noodles ($4). Our total before tip and the 3% credit card surcharge was $64.08.

Yuki House’s summer rolls are quite large, spanning from the bottom of my palm to the tip of my middle finger, and have rice noodles, shrimp and vegetables like green onions and lettuce in them. These mammoth rolls are a nice, light side dish to dunk into their scratch-made sweet garlic or peanut sauce.

Now for what I considered the best part of our meal: the noodles.

I’m a big noodle person, having grown up eating butter noodles as a regular side dish at dinner. Yuki House has set a new bar when it comes to noodles of any kind, especially hibachi noodles.

During an interview, Dalanay explained that she puts more herbs and ingredients in her noodles than most hibachi restaurants – and it certainly shows. These noodles had so much umami and garlic flavor and the consistency was spot on.

I returned two days after our initial visit and solely ordered a side of hibachi noodles – something I haven’t done with any other restaurant I’ve covered in the Beacon Journal’s Local Flavor series.

Crowd favorites on the Yuki House menu

Yuki House’s most popular menu items are mochiko chicken, Korean fried garlic chicken and Yuki’s barbecue chicken according to Dalanay, whose favorite dish is the pad Thai.

All of the restaurant’s sauces, from yum yum to peanut to hibachi, are made from scratch. Dalanay says that she doesn’t hold back on the sauces or spices in her food like some Americanized versions at other restaurants might. This applies to her Thai food especially, as it is made using a recipe from her mother’s region of Thailand.

From living in paradise to cooking in snowy Ohio

But Dalanay isn’t the only cook in her family.

Her mother was a chef at Chiang-Mai Thia Cuisine in Honolulu, Hawaii, for 30 years and is now retired, while Dalanay’s brother owns Ono Thai in Ewa Beach, Hawaii.

While family is important to Dalanay, the high cost of living in Hawaii as well as the lack of opportunities for her two daughters drove her immediate family’s move to the mainland.

“My daughter, she was a 4.0 [student],” Dalanay said. “But in Hawaii we would probably get the hardest time to get her to where she wants to be. Then I learned over here there's programs that if she's in high school and her grades are good, she can just jump into nursing or whatever she wants to do.”

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Hawaii is the most expensive state to live in in the United States, according to Worldpopulationreview.com, with a cost-of-living index almost twice the national average. The median rental cost for a two-bedroom apartment in Hawaii is $2,399. Groceries also cost 50% more than the national average since most goods must be shipped to the island.

So why come to Ohio?

Dalanay visited Warren for a year when she was 18 and liked the area, but when looking into moving there she was told to avoid the Warren and Youngstown areas because of safety concerns. So, she shifted her search south, toward the Akron-Canton area.

She moved to Ohio permanently in 2022 and opened Yuki House in April 2023.

Family is still important to Dalanay. Her two daughters work in the restaurant alongside her and, when she’s gone, she hopes they will continue running it.

She also hopes to open two more Yuki Houses, one being in Canton.

Got a restaurant recommendation? Contact Beacon Journal reporter Tawney Beans at tbeans@gannett.com and on Twitter @TawneyBeans. And follow her food adventures on TikTok @akronbeaconjournal.

Details

Place: Yuki House

Address: 1194 Tallmadge Road, Cuyahoga Falls

Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Friday and Saturday, noon to 9 p.m. Sunday

Website: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091256046803

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Yuki House brings hibachi, Thai, Hawaiian staples to Cuyahoga Falls