Yoo’s Place

Originally opened in Buena Park (2014) before expanding to Irvine (2023) and Westminster (2025), Yoo’s Place is the rare Orange County restaurant actually deserving of a “hidden gem” description – words so overused that they barely register these days. In Westminster, it’s nestled inside an H Mart grocery store, and in Irvine, it’s at the back-most end of Jamboree Promenade plaza, past neighbors including Aria Kitchen, Spicy Master, Xixi Fried Skewer, YGF Malatang, and Yonny. Yet it’s a surprisingly heavy hitter thanks to a handful of legitimately hard to find Korean dishes, great banchan, well-executed classics, and (at least in Irvine) strong table service.

What first caught our attention at Yoo’s Place was the “cold noodle” section of the menu: four versions of chic naengmyun, an arrowroot variant on standard buckwheat naengmyun noodles, with two classic beefs ($19 cold broth mul and $20 spicy bibim) and two $21 rare alternatives: hoe (raw fish) and saekimi (raw fish plus sliced beef). The chewy, cold, and moderately spicy saekimi offers guests the opportunity to enjoy powerful gochujang sauce, lightly sour and chewy cold noodles, and a mix of two meats, a hardboiled egg, matchstick-sliced cucumbers and Asian pear slices mixed with sesame seeds and nut powder – an even more exciting combination of flavors and ingredients than most naengmyun dishes, which we go out of our way to sample everywhere. Mild soup broth, should you want it, is offered cold on the side and hot in thermoses at each table.

Yoo’s banchan are quite good by 2026 standards, too. On our first visit in 2023, an oversized plate of cabbage kimchi, arrived with smaller bowls of radish kimchi, sweet sliced radish, spicy scallions, agar cubes, and creamy squash; more recently, the scallions and agar have given way to spicy cucumbers, neutral bean sprouts, and particularly delightful fishcake, each complementing Yoo’s appetizers and entrees. Servers repeatedly stopped by to refresh the seven bowls without being asked – variety that’s now rare at naengmyun specialists like Yukdaejang, plus the sort of “we care” service you won’t find at Korean places such as Yigah.