About the restaurant
御 Yu by Sijie opened in Las Vegas in August 2026 — a kitchen built around Peking duck, a dim sum section worked by hand, and a dining room its founder designed and built herself.
The house
A Chinese restaurant held to fine-dining standards, at a price a family is happy to return to.
Yu is a full-service Chinese dining room at 400 South Rampart Boulevard, Suite 190, in Las Vegas. It held its soft opening on August 7, 2026.
The character 御 (yù) describes what is set before the emperor — the imperial standard of a kitchen. It was chosen deliberately. The ambition here is stated plainly: hold flavour and service to a standard learned from Michelin restaurants, and still price a meal so that coming back is easy.
Not to be expensive. To be worth it.
The room
The most unusual thing about this restaurant may not be in the kitchen at all. Sijie took part personally in the whole design and build-out of the space.
Should the lighting be brighter, or dimmer? Where will guests be most comfortable sitting? How should tables be arranged so the room looks generous without feeling crowded? How should the kitchen be laid out so cooks can work smoothly, and what is the shortest route from the pass to the table?
Down to a single lamp, a single corner, a single wall, those questions were turned over again and again — and through the hardest stretch of the build she was on site herself, doing the work rather than watching it.
In the kitchen
The Peking duck is the dish this kitchen is built around, and the reason most tables are booked.
It arrives carved into glossy slices with warm pancakes, cucumber, spring onion and sweet bean sauce — a service that is worth watching as well as eating.
The dim sum is made here. Xiao long bao, sheng jian bao and the rest of the range are shaped by hand on site rather than bought in frozen, which is why they are folded, steamed and served in small batches through service.
The noodles carry the method behind Special Noodle, Sijie's Northern California brand — noodles treated in a particular way of her own. They are not hand-pulled, and the kitchen has never claimed otherwise.
How we work
Chinese cooking is largely an argument with fire. Seafood cooked seconds too long, a wok that never quite reaches temperature, a broth hurried — these are the failures that separate a good kitchen from a serious one. Ours is set up so the cook, not the clock, decides.
Dumplings and buns are shaped in the house each day, and the wok line cooks to order. That limits how much can leave the kitchen in an hour, and it is a limit we would rather keep than lose.
Thirty years of service taught Sijie that guests do not judge a restaurant by its best night. They judge it by its worst one. Consistency is not a lower ambition than brilliance — it is the harder one.
The founder
Thirty years in American restaurants, the Northern California brand Special Noodle, and a name she was finally willing to sign.
Sijie opened Special Noodle in 2021; it later reached Austin and Las Vegas. Yu is what came next — the restaurant she had held in her mind for years, with her own name written into the brand like a signature at the end of a piece of work.
Her full story — how she arrived in the United States, what thirty years on the line taught her, and why this restaurant exists — is told on its own page.
