Saskatoon’s Odd Couple restaurant featured on Food Network’s ‘Big Food Bucket List’

As a trained civil engineer, Saskatoon’s Andy Yuen didn’t think he’d one day have his own highly successful local restaurant, let alone be prominently featured in a Food Network series.

But that’s exactly what has happened.

Yuen, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, moved with his parents to Saskatchewan when he was 15. It was in Wynyard where he learned about the restaurant business.

“My uncle had a restaurant there and then we stayed there for about a year and a half,” he recalled. “Then my parents got a little cafe in Lanigan and so … within those two restaurants I guess I worked there in the kitchen and I used to serve for my parents and every now and then I got to cook.”

At the time, he didn’t want to follow in his parents’ footsteps, so he went to the University of Saskatchewan and got his civil engineering degree. His parents then moved to Saskatoon, and opened up another restaurant in Warman with him in 2007 called Chopsticks.

“So I never got professionally trained as a chef, but I spent more than half my life in restaurants,” he said.

Yuen and his wife opened Odd Couple in the Riversdale neighborhood in 2014. Yuen says they try to incorporate local ingredients and bring a variety of Asian flavours to their dishes, including Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Japanese elements.

“When we started Odd Couple, in my mind I thought Asian food’s much more than what was on the scene at the time,” Yuen said. “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.”

He wanted his customers to see another side of Asian cuisine — elegance and beauty.

John Catucci of Big Food Bucket List at Odd Couple. (Andy Yuen/Submitted)

In early 2019, a Food Network production company reached out to him and one of the producers who did some research on the restaurant became intrigued with some of the brunch dishes Yuen created. There were some meetings, there was some background information exchanged, and Odd Couple was in.

“She said ‘OK, great. We’ll include you on Season 2 of John Catucci’s Big Food Bucket List,’ ” Yuen said. “So that’s how we got started. We’re super excited.”

Yuen says the experience has been surreal.

“I used to watch lots of Food Network when I was going through engineering school,” he said. “Almost 20 years ago, I would go in the basement of the engineering building and study, and then go home and watch something like Anna Olsen, and go bake for three hours. That’s how I would chill out.”

The production company filmed over two days in 2019 and two dishes were chosen.

“We prepared a dish called the Kung Pao chicken with Hong Kong waffle. It’s essentially like a fried chicken and waffle dish but with a bubble waffle … which is a Hong Kong-style waffle, where I’m from, and then we use a spicy kung pao sauce,” he explained.

The second dish was a kind of breakfast Pad Thai, with sausage, bacon and a fried egg on top.

After taping wrapped up, the show went on to another 70 other restaurants throughout North America that year. Yuen says production was apparently stalled for some time during 2020 because of COVID-19, and many of his friends were wondering when the episode would be broadcast.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, he got a call.

“I got an email from the production company (in late December/early January) telling me that it was going to be on last Saturday night. So that was great,” he said.

Since then, he has had an outpouring of compliments and support from the community, including old friends from Wynyard and Lanigan, and visits to the restaurant from people across the province.

“It was a lot more than I had thought — people sending me texts, telling me right after the show … It was a lot of love and I appreciate it,” Yuen said.

A little bit shy, Yuen said he doesn’t normally like hearing or seeing himself on TV. He says his wife encouraged him to watch the show, though, and he’s happy he did. He also thanks local chefs Dale McKay and Christie Peters for their help and inspiration.

“When we first opened, we were worried about how we were going to make the very next month,” Yuen said. “To come this far during COVID was honestly the best timing for us.”