Yue Yan

We will admit to being overly optimistic about Jiang Nan, the first Orange County location of a New York-based Chinese-American fusion restaurant chain that opened at Irvine’s Orange Tree Square shopping center in November 2025. Though the same location had already been home to substantial Chinese destinations including Sam Woo BBQ and Tang Du – each starting strong before declining and disappearing – Jiang Nan’s very good cooking, upscale remodeling, and ambitious service set it apart from plaza neighbors such as Bafang Dumpling, Menya Hanabi, Mo-Mo-Paradise, and YinTang. But the chain’s West Coast expansion appears to have hit snags; a Washington location closed after less than a year, shortly after the Irvine location opened. Then in early July 2026, Irvine’s Jiang Nan abruptly gave way to Yue Yan (aka Yue Yan Chinese Fusion), a “refreshed brand” with the same management and culinary teams. A server initially suggested that the prior name was dropped because guests thought the food was from the same-named Chinese region, but when pressed further, explained that the owners had ended their partnership with the NY parent company and gone solo.

Apart from some cosmetic changes to the digital menu, temporary Yue Yan signage, and some photocopied “grand opening” ads in the windows, not much has changed from the Jiang Nan days. Tablets with digital menus offer half or whole Peking Ducks (still listed as Pecking Duck), cumin lamb dishes, soup dumplings, plenty of pork and beef choices, many stir- or deep-fried seafood items, and some vegetarian entrees. There are few appetizers, and most dishes are in the $20 to $30 range, with duck and seafood plates pushing past those numbers. Handfuls of drinks ($4 to $10) and desserts ($12 to $15) are also available, ranging from canned sodas and candle-heated teapots to fresh-cooked or pre-made sweets.

While the Irvine location’s interior design isn’t quite up to Meizhou Dongpo levels of elegance or Xibei-style scale, it’s an improvement on the latter Sam Woo and Tang Du years; one’s focus quickly shifts from the dining room forest to the tree-like wooden tables as servers deliver dishes. At Jiang Nan, each table received a small but refillable bowl of spiced and pickled cabbage to whet the appetite before ordering; this was supposed to continue at Yue Yan, but didn’t happen on our visit. Once you select your dishes on the tablet, a server will arrive and confirm your choices.

We previously sampled a variety of dishes to get a sense of what was good here, and the answer was “pretty much everything.” On our first visit, the least standout items we ordered were two “Pecking Duck Spring Rolls” ($9), which were sliced sharply in half and poorly plated, but perfectly crispy outside and uniquely duck-filled inside. Next up were a $13 set of “Lucky Four Soup Dumplings” (pork, crab and pork, chicken and shrimp, chicken and black truffle) that were fairly thick-skinned and low on soup compared with Din Tai Fung’s, but fine on filling and solid in flavor. We wound up re-ordering those dumplings on our Yue Yan visit, and they were unchanged.

Other dishes were very good, though on the pricey side. Shredded Eel with Scallion in Hot Oil ($38) mixed a substantial portion of french fry-sized eel slices with a rich soy-based brown sauce and fresh scallions – a more generous treat seemingly designed for fans of Japanese-style eel (including us). A Chinese-American dish called Crispy Chicken with Blueberry Sauce ($25) was a non-citrus orange chicken with no kick, but still good. Crispy Shredded Beef with Lime Sauce ($26) wasn’t so much shredded as thin-sliced and lightly battered beef topped with lemon peels – not exactly what we expected, but just the right combination of crispy, citric, and umami sensations to make the plate quickly disappear.