Winnie Yee-Lakhani’s Smoke Queen Barbecue makes brick-and-mortar debut – Orange County Register

After more than three years as a groundbreaking Chinese-American barbecue joint, Winnie Yee-Lakhani’s Smoke Queen Barbecue is opening its first standalone restaurant in Garden Grove on Saturday, March 9. What started as a side project has since blossomed into a barbecue innovation. that has taken over the Southern California food world.

Like other successful businesses in recent years, Yee-Lakhani’s Smoke Queen began as a simple pandemic experiment, meant to pass the time while the world came to a screeching halt. “When I launched this concept during the pandemic, it was meant to be a creative distraction from all the noise that was going on at the time,” said the Michelin-starred chef, who also co-owns Bruxie in Costa Mesa.

A service franchisee since 2009, Yee-Lakhani was no stranger to the culinary scene, but she had always wanted to explore her creative side (namely barbecue) but rarely had the opportunity. In 2018, she tentatively planned to convert one of her existing restaurants into her own barbecue concept called Char, but those plans were scrapped. Enter the mandatory lockdowns, which gave him the time and bandwidth to learn new techniques to add to his already impressive culinary arsenal.

“My passion for cooking started when I was a child in my grandmother and mother’s kitchen, and all the techniques I learned were Chinese, but before starting Smoke Queen Barbecue, I didn’t know really how to smoke meat,” she confessed. . Lacking American-style meat-smoking prowess, Yee-Lakhani turned to the internet to learn her craft. After trial and error and an excess of patience, she quickly honed her skills and, along with Heritage Barbecue and only a handful of others, created one of the best barbecue concepts in Southern California.

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Shortly after opening his then-fledgling business (and joining forces with famed pitmaster Jared Ruiz and his brother and business partner, Kevin Yee) by posting a simple photo of a brisket smoked for 16 hours in August 2020, his pandemic distraction morphed into a full-fledged culinary sound boom heard across Southern California, attracting glowing press to Yee-Lakhani, dozens of new followers and appearances on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” and “Chopped ” and Food Network’s “Barbecue Brawl.” All of his work, which combines the flavors and techniques of Los Angeles, Texas and Southeast Asia, has now culminated in the creation of Smoke Queen Barbecue’s first independent restaurant in the new Cottage Industries in Garden Grove, the long-awaited microneighborhood project that redeveloped older homes east of the Garden Grove Civic Center.

“It’s funny when I think about it because it’s so weird to say that one day I googled ‘how to smoke a brisket’ and then, three and a half years and a lifetime later, I I opened a restaurant,” she said.

Their concept, unique to Orange County (if not the entire Southern California region), takes traditional Asian flavors and marries them with American smoking techniques. Yee-Lakhani, which uses Texas-style offset smokers to slow cook its meats, will offer smoked brisket, pork belly, ribs and chicken, all seasoned, rubbed or glazed with Asian ingredients. “We will also have rotating specials that will be traditionally Asian, like curry, which will be accompanied by smoked meats to showcase the versatility of American barbecue,” Yee said.

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Yee-Lakhani’s work and flavor profiles, she explained, are all “strongly rooted in my identity as a Southeast Asian.” Its sesame salad is accompanied by Thai basil, mapo chili tinged with fermented soy paste, homemade barbecue sauce with black vinegar and its bread pudding cooked with kaya cream (coconut and pandan cream). ). “All of these ingredients have one thing in common; 媽媽的味道 “Ma Ma de wei tau,” which means “mom’s flavors,” she said. “In other words, food for the soul.”

The new space, featuring a charcoal-colored wood slat exterior and a covered outdoor seating area brightened up with blond wood, is equipped with three new custom smokers. “Jared and I worked with Chuck from Heh Designs to create our current layout,” she said. “For me, workflow and cooking line capacity are very important and I think we hit the nail on the head. We also worked with Shane Gonzalas and Bobby Titus of Titus Smokers to design our three custom giant smokers and I chose the finishes.

But even more important than Smoke Queen Barbecue’s physical space, which is admittedly stunning in all its contemporary glory, is the niche that Yee-Lakhani and her team occupy in Orange County’s dining landscape — and beyond. Every day, guests will see Jared and Winnie either working the smokers or behind the kitchen line. “Jared is Filipino-Mexican and I am Malaysian-Chinese. The two biggest preconceptions or myths I’m busting are that women can’t barbecue as well as men and Asians can’t do American barbecue. As a petite Asian woman, I’m not ignorant of my size, gender, and ethnicity compared to the norm seen at American barbecue joints across the country.

Arriving in the United States when she was just 5 years old and spoke little English, she says that as an immigrant child of the ’90s, she struggled to find her identity, explaining : “I’m not fully Chinese, I’m not fully American. I’m Chinese-American and I hope to define a new culinary category of Asian-American barbecue. Since founding Smoke Queen in 2020, Yee-Lakhani has encountered her fair share of skeptics in the barbecue scene, she admits, particularly from those tied to an outdated, glowering idea of ​​America. But to those naysayers, she had this to say: “Barbecue belongs to everyone. »

Smoke Queen Barbecue officially opens its doors on Saturday, March 9 and will operate Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. with plans to expand hours and days in the near future.

Find it: 12941 9th Street, Garden Grove