Whatever your plans are for the weekend, make room for a three-day pop-up event happening at Le Shrimp Noodle Bar in Costa Mesa. From Friday Nov. 17 to Sunday Nov. 19, steaming bowls of smoked char siu (Cantonese barbecue pork) prawn noodle soup will be served inside the South Coast Plaza-based restaurant.
It’s part of a collaboration between pitmaster Winnie Yee-Lakhani (co-owner of a nearby Bruxie and of the upcoming brick-and-mortar Smoke Queen in Garden Grove) and Le Shrimp, who hitched together their culinary efforts to create a new surf-and-turf culinary moment.
For her pork, which she prepares using a Texas-style offset smoker, Yee-Lakhani adds her own twist to conventional American barbecue. “Traditional American flavors are common so I wanted to put Asian and Chinese flavors, like five spice that I’ve changed to eight spice,” she says. “It’s first marinated like traditional Cantonese barbecue but I smoke it on the offset low and slow for eight hours with live white oak giving it a different texture and flavor.” The result is a lacquered and slightly more chewy meat with layers of complexity that go above and beyond notions of barbecue in the U.S.
SEE ALSO: Bruxie opens in Bloomingdale’s at South Coast Plaza, marking its 5th Southern California location
Yee-Lakhani’s char siu, which earned a glowing review from the New York Times, “is a reflection of me, my heritage and my upbringing as an Asian American,” she adds.
The collaboration came about by neighborly happenstance. Yee-Lakhani’s Bruxie, a chicken and waffle sandwich chain that she and her brother opened in 2022, is located a stone’s throw from Le Shrimp, inside South Coast Plaza’s Bloomingdale’s. “(Le Shrimp’s owner and I) were talking one day and I told him, ‘You guys need a pork item in your…
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