Andy Yuen (Odd Couple, SULU): From Hong Kong to Saskatchewan's Top Table
The building across the street from Odd Couple used to be a Chinese grocery store. Andy Yuen remembers it from his first night in Canada, when his family stopped there on the way from the Saskatoon airport to Wynyard. He was 15 years old, it was 1996, and it was minus 35.
Now he sees that building every day from the restaurant he built on 20th Street in Riversdale. He didn't plan that. But the symmetry tells you something about how immigration, food, and Saskatchewan have shaped each other over the past three decades.
Chicken balls and T-bone steaks
Yuen's family came to Saskatchewan to help his uncle run a Chinese restaurant in Wynyard, a town of fewer than 2,000 people. His grandmother could finally retire. His parents took over, then bought their own café in Lanigan, another small town down the highway.
The menu was what small-town prairie customers expected. "We were a Chinese restaurant but we sold T-bone steaks, hamburgers, French fries and chicken balls," Yuen told CBC Radio. He'd never seen a chicken ball before he came to Canada.
That gap between what his family knew how to cook and what they were serving stayed with him. For a teenager who'd left a happy school life and a girlfriend in a city of six million people, the restaurant felt like proof that his old life was gone. He racked up a $1,000 phone bill calling Hong Kong in his first month.
He didn't want to follow his parents into the business. He studied civil engineering at the University of Saskatchewan instead.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
Nine years of engineering, three hours of baking
Yuen practiced engineering for nine years. But the pull never stopped. During engineering school, he'd study in the basement of the engineering building, then go home and watch Anna Olsen on Food Network, then bake for three hours. "That's how I would chill out," he told CKOM.
The return to restaurants happened in stages. First, he helped his parents open Chopsticks in Warman in 2007. His parents found the commute from Saskatoon brutal after 12-hour days. They sold in 2013.
Then the idea came to him while drinking with friends at a pub. "What if people are sick of burger and fries with a pint? What if people just want ginger beef with a gin and tonic?"
Odd Couple opened in May 2014, in a narrow space on 20th Street in Riversdale. The name comes from Andy and his father: two very different people trying to run a restaurant together.
The fight about the kitchen
The "odd couple" tension was real from day one. When they were designing the space, Andy's father Sam wanted the biggest kitchen possible. Andy wanted to spend money on décor and lighting. They had a finite budget. They fought.
The design they landed on draws from Wong Kar-wai's 1960s Hong Kong film "In the Mood for Love." Mahogany screens, Bocci lights, a walnut veneer bar. The overhead garage door on the street side creates the feel of a Dai Pa Dong, the open-air restaurants of Andy's childhood.
It's a long way from T-bone steaks in Lanigan.
But the bigger fight came after opening. One busy Saturday, Andy suggested staggering the kitchen staff over lunch. His parents didn't agree. It escalated. "My dad said, 'I guess I'm gonna quit,'" Andy told CBC Radio. "He grabbed his car keys, took off from the back door and he didn't come back for the day."
The next day, they talked. For his parents, the midday break wasn't optional. They needed to eat together as a family. Every day.
Since then, Odd Couple has closed from 2:00 to 4:30 every afternoon. The family eats lunch together. No exceptions.
"A restaurant is a caring business," Yuen says. "It's not just about food. It's about how much you care about people. I don't think I could find better people to work with."
There's a line he added with a laugh: "I'm also the only child. The money will eventually go to me anyway, so I might as well make them happy while they are alive."
Beyond chicken balls
Yuen's cooking philosophy is straightforward but quietly radical for the prairies. No single regional Asian cuisine. The only rule is that they use Asian cooking techniques, then combine them with whatever local ingredients are worth using, which meant building relationships with Saskatchewan producers one at a time: Pineview Farm beef and chicken, Floating Gardens cherry tomatoes, Black Fox gin from right here in Saskatoon.
"When we started Odd Couple, in my mind I thought Asian food's much more than what was on the scene at the time," he told Discover Saskatoon. "I hope people in Saskatchewan think of Asian food as more than chicken balls and chicken fried rice and it needs to be cheap and it needs to be big portions."
That push landed. Odd Couple sits at number one of 576 restaurants in Saskatoon on TripAdvisor. In 2016, the Saskatoon Regional Economic Development Authority gave Yuen their Newcomer Entrepreneur of the Year award. The restaurant employed over 20 people, nine of them newcomers, the same hiring pipeline prairie kitchens still lean on. Sales were up 30% year over year.
In 2019, Food Network came calling. Odd Couple was featured on Season 2 of John Catucci's Big Food Bucket List. Two dishes made the cut: a Kung Pao chicken with Hong Kong bubble waffle and a breakfast Pad Thai with sausage, bacon, and a fried egg.
SULU: revive the dragon
In 2024, Andy and Rachel Kong, his wife and partner, welcomed their first son. The couple decided to stay in Saskatoon and keep building.
Their second restaurant, SULU, opened in February 2025 at 226 Second Avenue South. The space used to house Sticks & Stones, one of Dale MacKay's Grassroots Restaurant Group concepts. Andy and Rachel used to go there after their shifts at Odd Couple. "We spent enough time here as customers already," Yuen told CBC.
The name carries weight. "Every sound in Chinese can be a written character," he explained. "'SU' can mean many things, but one of them is 'revive' or 'reborn,' and then 'LU' for us means dragon. So we were reviving this space in the Year of the Dragon, and then our son was born in 2024 as well."
SULU serves Asian tapas fired on an authentic Japanese charcoal grill, one of only two in Saskatchewan. The menu is different from Odd Couple: bao buns and dumplings made in-house, skewers cooked over charcoal and infrared heat, cocktails built with local spirits.
Staying
When Yuen talks about why he stayed in Saskatchewan, he keeps coming back to his first years in Wynyard and Lanigan. Not the restaurants themselves, but the people.
"Really, if I didn't go to a small town right from the get-go I wouldn't be here today," he told CBC. "I think I would have just gone back to Hong Kong."
There's a pattern here that matters for anyone running an independent restaurant. Yuen didn't come from culinary school. He didn't have investors or a media strategy. He had family, a willingness to change direction, and a conviction that his city deserved better than what was available. Three generations of Yuens have cooked in Saskatchewan. Each one got closer to cooking what they actually wanted to serve.
The Chinese grocery store across the street is gone now. But Andy Yuen is still here, feeding people.
Sources: CBC News, CBC Radio DNTO, 650 CKOM, CBC Saskatoon Bites, Discover Saskatoon, SREDA, bldg.studio.
