Name: Lucky Yu
Item: Lucky Yu
Rating: 4
Author: Harden's editor

Harden's says

Relocated in 2023 from Leven Street in Bruntsfield; Asian small plates and cocktails.

Harden's survey result

2025
2024

Summary

Price*

£35

Food

Very Good

Service

Good

Ambience

Good

* Based on a three course dinner, half a bottle of wine, coffee, cover charge, service and VAT.

“Excellent Asian-fusion cuisine” features in feedback on this small-plates venue, which moved in 2023 from Leven Street in Bruntsfield. On the menu: handmade specialty dumplings, bao buns, chicken wings, sando, yakitori and other pan-Asian bites.

Summary

Price*

£32

Food

Very Good

Service

Good

Ambience

Good

* Based on a three course dinner, half a bottle of wine, coffee, cover charge, service and VAT.

Handmade speciality dumplings, bao buns, small plates and chicken wings comprise the menu at this pan-Asian small plates restaurant (with cocktails), which relocated in 2023 from Leven Street in Bruntsfield. On limited feedback in our annual diners’ poll, our early reporters are enthusiastic all-round as was The Scotsman’s Gaby Soutar in her May 2023 review, who applauded “big fun flavours, lovely staff and the sort of space you want to linger in” – plus tatties “I haven’t enjoyed this much in ages”.

For 34 years we've been curating reviews of the UK's most notable restaurant. In a typical year, diners submit over 50,000 reviews to create the most authoritative restaurant guide in the UK. Each year, the guide is re-written from scratch based on this survey (although for the 2021 edition, reviews are little changed from 2020 as no survey could run for that year).

Have you eaten at Lucky Yu?

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53-55 Broughton Street, Edinburgh, EH1 3RJ

What the Newspaper Critics are saying

The Observer

Jay Rayner did his best to enjoy the “bluntly pleasing Asian-inspired dishes” served amid an “amiable, relaxed kind of chaos” at this Edinburgh restaurant, where former Gardener’s Cottage chef Duncan Adamson runs the kitchen.

But for all his warm feelings towards the place, Jay could not hide his disappointment at the heavy-handed cooking. An early indication was the colour of the Japanese fried chicken, or karaage – “too long in the deep fat fryer” dark. And so, on tasting, it proved: “A hyper-crunchy exterior, of crusted skin which curls back on itself to provide a matrix of crevices, gives way to dense fibrous bird. This is not the best chicken karaage ever.

“Which can be expanded to describe the entire repertoire of salty-sweet, miso-slicked, soy-bathed, yuzu-dressed dishes which attract so many British-born chefs, eager to serve up flavour bomb after flavour bomb.”

Jay Rayner - 2025-01-05