DaVinci & Yu — Restaurant in Philadelphia

When I went to Portland for a one-week vacation, I stumbled upon a Thai-Italian fusion restaurant. I kept going back every day until I had tried everything on the menu—and I was blown away.

I was really hoping this restaurant would bring some of that deliciousness to Philly, but that is not the case, and I will not be returning.

Everything is overpriced and comes in small portions. Many people in my party don’t eat pork and the other options didn’t have any protein, so we were all still hungry and ended up going to the tapas place a few doors down to get good food at reasonable prices after our meal.

This is not a “fine dining” restaurant in any way except for the prices.

I love Thai, Lao, Japanese, Pakistani, and Chinese cuisine—but what Asian cuisine is Yu referencing? There’s clearly no real consideration for the intricate and flavorful nature of these food traditions. The cauliflower and shrimp toast were drenched in oil. The dumplings were so salty. Honestly everything my friends got tasted bland or weird. Just judging by the other reviews it’s clear people from different backgrounds such as myself do not enjoy this food.

Why not just stick to Italian when there’s no real Asian influence beyond generic buzzwords like “miso” and appropriative decor. Which by the way if they really cared about the culture the least they could do is get Miso from a Japanese owned business. No they get it from white people from Massachusetts.

The owner left a comment on my friends review saying food transforms borders. Which can be true - but here’s the thing a white man is profiting off of another culture. He is choosing to support businesses of other white people who profit off of our culture. He does not care to give back or support our community/businesses, learn our traditions, respect our culture. This is beyond disappointing but unsurprising in this day and age.

The only plus was the drinks—they were strong and actually felt worth the cost, unlike everything els. The service was also top notch; the staff made the place feel homey, which makes it even more disappointing that the food, prices, décor, and bathrooms were all subpar.

I wanted to find a new favorite restaurant, but it’s clear this won’t be it. I still have hope that someone with more experience and genuine care for pan-Asian cuisine and culture will do this do Italian/pan-asian justice in Philly. In the mean time I will be at Black Dragon in...

I really don’t like writing negative reviews, but I feel like this place has potential but completely fell flat, unfortunately. The idea itself is cool - I’ve never personally seen Italian and Asian work together in a restaurant setting, but realistically it could.

Let’s start with the positives: when we arrived we got no service for a solid 10 or so minutes after we were seated, but the host (who might be the owner?) apologized kindly and provided us our appetizer for free, which we appreciated. She was sincere and overall an enthusiastic and polite person. Our appetizer, the Bao buns (originally for $13 I believe) were solid, but nothing special. Nothing unique about them. Then came the udon with tomato sauce, some scallions and three duck meatballs for $25. It came super fast; almost concerningly fast (maybe to comp us for the earlier experience?) This was an unfortunate dish. There was no Asian twist beyond the scallions in the tomato sauce and the Udon (which functioned like any pasta). No spices no soy or some other type of glaze. Nothing. The meatballs themselves, on the other hand, were very good. But they were small and there were three of them! I completely understand the difficulty of margins in the restaurant business, but three small meatballs is unreasonable, and it was hard to enjoy them with the pasta (udon). My friend got the Ramen which was apparently not memorable either.

Operating in a foodie paradise like East Passyunk has the advantage of getting many walk-ins because people generally trust the quality of places in the neighborhood. On the other hand, quality, creativity, and a unique twist is something many (maybe not all, but many indeed) expect. I really wanted this restaurant to succeed and maybe it will, but the chef/operator needs to choose an identity for the restaurant - is it going to be a creative twist of Asian Italian cuisine where risk is prized and the flavors are indeed mixed together OR is it going to be just essentially a takeout quality place with ingredients (rather than flavors) of mixed Italian/Asian origin. This is up to the restaurant to decide, and I hope they...

I had really high hopes for this new concept and while it wasn’t awful, it was not great. Our server, Hailey, was lovely, and the staff was pleasant overall, and that alone would have us back! Food review: We ordered the kung pao chicken bao but were brought the wrong bao, so they came back and took it off our table to give to the correct table; the one we did order and receive was just okay.. it lacked the peanut sauce flavor as advertised - in saying that, this was the best dish of our meal. I had the miso cacio e pepe and it didn’t taste like miso nor pepper, more so just an alfredo-y sauce with some shredded seaweed on top. It was also such a small portion that I ended up ordering a second entree, the teriyaki cauliflower, that was waaaay too salty (too salty seemed to be the flavor profile of every dish). My partner ordered the shank and it was cooked to perfection, but again the sauce was very salty. We ordered two desserts: black sesame tiramisu that was so overwhelmingly black sesame forward that you couldn’t taste coffee (assuming you should..), and the banana cannoli that had a very runny filling that didn’t taste of banana or really anything at all, which was odd. The ube espresso martini was just a regular espresso martini which was a bummer because it sounds like such a cool drink! We spent $200, had overly salty, one-note dishes, and desserts we didn’t even finish because it just.. wasn’t great. I say all of this honestly and with the highest hopes that when we return in the future, the dishes might be tweaked as they find their footing, iron out some kinks, and receive feedback. It’s a fun concept, but fell a little flat in...