SULU offers Asian-style tapas, with food fired on an authentic Japanese grill
Social Sharing
Where in Saskatoon can you enjoy bao buns made from scratch, a cocktail featuring rum from the Philippines and skewers grilled to perfection on an authentic Japanese grill?
The answer is SULU, now open at 226 Second Ave S.
Local foodies will be familiar with the location. Previously home to both Sticks & Stones and Food & Beverage YXE — owned by Grassroots Restaurant Group — the space is no stranger to incredible eats.
SULU is no exception. It's the second Saskatoon restaurant opened by Andy Yuen and Rachel Kong, the couple behind the beloved Odd Couple restaurant in Riversdale.
"We always loved the layout of this space," Yuen said of the Second Avenue spot. "Rachel and I actually used to come here after our shifts at Odd Couple. So we spent enough time here as customers already."
Yuen is excited to offer a menu at SULU that combines Vietnamese, Cantonese, Japanese and North American flavours to deliver an Asian-style tapas menu.
From 1 restaurant to 2
Yuen and Kong opened Odd Couple in 2014, alongside Yuen's parents. Yuen grew up in Hong Kong and immigrated to Canada with his parents in the 1990s, while Kong first came to Saskatchewan from Guangzhou to study at the University of Regina.
Although Yuen's parents had operated Chinese restaurants in Saskatchewan for years, Yuen wasn't initially interested in opening his own restaurant; he trained as an engineer. But when the opportunity to open a restaurant presented itself nearly 11 years ago, he decided to take the plunge with Odd Couple.
The road to opening SULU began after the couple welcomed their first son in 2024. They decided to stay in Saskatoon and continue to build on their network and relationships here with another restaurant.
They got the keys to the Second Avenue location in October 2024 and began renovating. They kept the original layout, including an expansive wood bar in the back of the restaurant, but added new upholstery and decor, including stunning red lanterns that hang throughout the restaurant.
SULU's doors opened in February 2025. The couple chose the name to signify new beginnings.
"Every sound in Chinese can be a written character. 'SU' can mean many things, but one of them is 'revive' or 'reborn,' and then 'LU' for us means dragon," Yuen said. "So we were reviving this space in the Year of the Dragon, and then our son was born in 2024 as well."
WATCH | Come with me to SULU restaurant:
Come with me to SULU restaurant
19 minutes ago
Duration 0:26
An evening spot with a menu to match
Yuen said that when he was planning SULU's menu, there were two things on his mind. The first was creating an Asian-style tapas menu that would be perfect for light dinners, after work drinks or late nights.
The second thing on his mind was a meal that he and Rachel ate in Osaka, Japan, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, at a restaurant that featured an authentic Japanese grill.
"It was the last meal we ate out before COVID-19," Yuen said. "I just kept coming back to it."
Yuen decided to put one of these Japanese grills in SULU. He said there is only one other grill like it in Saskatchewan.
The grill cooks skewers to a perfect tenderness using charcoal and infrared heat.
SULU offers several skewers, including chicken, tofu and prosciutto-wrapped grapes, which are a customer favourite. The skewers are a must-try at SULU, given the unique grill, and a perfect option to start with.
Other popular items include their bao buns and dumplings — both of which are made in-house — and their Korean fried chicken, which is the original recipe from Sticks and Stones. Be sure to also try one of their hand-crafted cocktails or mocktails, which are a perfect menu accompaniment. The Lucky Rabbit cocktail, for example, incorporates White Rabbit candies that have been melted down into a syrup, alongside local vodka from Lucky Bastard, to create a sweet and citrusy drink.
Yuen said the menus at SULU and Odd Couple are very different, but both restaurants have strong focuses on curated selections of delicious eats in a setting that's modern, warm and inviting.
"It's about the food and the drinks, but the world is crazy right now so we want people to be able to come in and find an escape — both at Odd Couple and SULU," Yuen said. "I'm grateful, and people so far walk out of here happy, and that's what we wanted."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
National Observer
an hour ago
- National Observer
Carney won't reveal spending plans, enraging critics — but some call it savvy
The West Block of Parliament is a great place to hide. A labyrinth of hallways and alcoves, committee rooms and stairways, it's the architectural expression of Ottawa's sprawling bureaucracy. At the heart of the maze is the House of Commons, a cavernous room where parliament sits while the years-long renovation of their original seat in Centre Block, next door, is completed. Until then, West Block is where Question Period takes place – but even here, perhaps especially here, answers are hard to find. Canadians were reminded of that as Question Period resumed on Wednesday, with Prime Minister Carney in the hot seat for his debut performance. The viewing gallery was packed; prominent journalists, the mayor of Toronto, PEI's premier, senators and family members of parliamentarians all came to watch the show. The day's Big Question was why Mr. Carney won't release a federal budget before fall. By then it will have been over a year since the government released one, an unprecedented gap (outside of 2020, when Covid derailed the process). Interim Conservative leader Andrew Scheer and others in his party asked the budget question repeatedly. In lieu of an answer, Carney – perfectly at ease as he lobbed jokes and jabs across the aisle – pointed out that Pierre Polievre's 100-day plan announced during the election hadn't included a budget either. From there on, he and his finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, took turns repeating the great news that they were delivering a tax cut and breaking down provincial trade barriers. Disappointing for those hoping for answers, but not surprising. Question Period is for sound bites and sick burns, not genuine replies. For those, you have to go outside. In this case, all the way to Rome – it was there, during his visit to greet the new Pope, that Mr. Carney gave reporters the closest thing he's given to an explanation for skipping the spring budget. 'There's not much value in trying to rush through a budget in a very narrow window — three weeks — with a new cabinet [and] effectively a new finance minister," he said. "We will have a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall." He elaborated briefly this week, in an interview with Power and Politics on the afternoon of the Throne Speech. 'I'm not a fan of picking an arbitrary number and then figuring out how to spend up to it,' he told host David Cochrane, after describing a host of uncertainties looming over Canada's defence budget. 'That's one of the reasons we will have a fall budget, not a budget tomorrow.' These excuses rang hollow to NDP MP Heather McPherson. In light of the intense furor caused by the budget's delay, it's baffling why Carney invited such a storm. It didn't just dominate the first week of Question Period, it unleashed a predictable slew of withering news articles and op-eds. 'For him to constantly say that everyone is new — nobody's buying that,' McPherson told Canada's National Observer over the phone this week. 'This is literally [the Liberals'] fourth mandate, with many of the same caucus members, with almost the entirety of the financial department staff being the same.' The day after Carney's first Question Period, finance minister Champagne told Politico that the reason Liberals are waiting until fall is they want to have 'more clarity around defense, around the trade war that is happening now in the world,' referring to tariffs and the upcoming NATO meeting where Canada's defence budget is almost certain to rise dramatically. Champagne said the government is also waiting to get 'initial feedback from our initiatives on government efficiency.' McPherson didn't buy that either. 'For Mark Carney to say, 'we don't know what's going to happen with military spending' – well, you ran on a military spending plan. Is that not the military spending plan that you are now going to take to NATO?' Uncertainty is baked into the whole budgeting process, she said; it's why spring budgets are followed and adjusted by fall economic forecasts. 'There'll be changes in a lot of things. There's going to be changes next year. Do we not get a budget next year because there might be changes? That's not how budgets work, and he knows that.' Indeed, he does. A central irony to all this is that the most famous banker in Canadian history seems indifferent to the value of a timely budget. This begs a question no one asked in Question Period: Why do we need a budget now? Big, beautiful budgets According to Michael Wernick, the former Clerk of the Privy Council, deputy minister under three prime ministers, and one of the most experienced former bureaucrats in Canada, we don't. 'In practical or operational terms, the four-month delay really doesn't matter,' Wernick told Canada's National Observer in a phone interview. 'In days gone by, the budget was mostly a statement of tax measures,' he said. 'The practice of having a big, beautiful budget, chock full of just about everything the government wants to do in the coming year and hundreds of pages of implementation legislation covering everything from A to Z, is a fairly recent practice.' The day-to-day business of a government doesn't depend on a budget. Payments to civil servants, transfers to provinces, funding the various ministries and departments — all these costs go out more or less automatically. It's the new spending measures that require parliamentary approval. One example is the 1 per cent tax cut Carney has promised to Canadians in the lowest income bracket; that can only come into effect once parliament has voted for it. The same goes for increasing the defence budget, or deploying billions for new housing, and so on. Over the past two decades, Wernick explained, governments of both parties have tended to jam their entire year's goals into a single budget. 'So you've got these huge omnibus bills and a fight with parliament,' he said. 'But they're too big and they cover too many things and they're cramping parliament's ability to properly review them. The Conservatives criticize the Liberals for doing it. The Liberals criticized the Conservatives for doing it.' Those giant omnibus budget bills force parliament to either approve or reject everything at once. On top of that, rejecting a budget automatically brings down the government, forcing a brand new election – something no party, or Canadian, wants right now, regardless of how they feel about the budget. For that reason 'Breaking [the budget] up into pieces might actually lead to better scrutiny by parliament,' Wernick says. Rather than an all-or-nothing vote with the sword of a new election hanging over their decision, MPs of all parties can (for now) approve, reject or amend each spending measure on its own merits, one at a time. Not everyone agrees, of course. 'The history of accountability and democracy is really coterminous with control of the budgets over the executive branch,' says Ian Lee, an associate professor in the Spratt School of Business at Carleton University (and a onetime candidate for MP under Kim Campbell's Progressive Conservative banner). 'It's not the end of the world if a national government doesn't table its budget, but it reduces transparency; it reduces, to a small degree, confidence in the government and in the stability of that country.' 'It's about legitimacy,' agrees Christopher Ragan, founding director of the Max Bell School of Public Policy who currently teaches economics at McGill. 'I mean, if you really want a well-informed debate about spending, especially in the world of a minority government, we should probably know what the books look like. And we don't know what the books look like. The last time we saw a fiscal update was in December, and that was like a whole lifetime ago.' Uncertain times on the barbecue circuit December was before Trump's inauguration and the ensuing trade war; before Justin Trudeau stepped down; before it became clear that Canada's economic future would bear little resemblance to its recent past. That's another crucial aspect of a budget – by spelling out the state of a nation's finances, it forms the material basis for debate about how the government will spend taxpayer's dollars. But here, too, Michael Wernick feels a budget's importance is overstated. 'The Department of Finance puts out something called the fiscal monitor every month,' he points out. 'Nobody ever pays attention to it and writes articles about it, but they're obliged to put out quarterly financial statements. So every three months the department will put a snapshot out of where it is.' But what if MPs want more recent or granular information, especially given the tremendous rate of change? 'If parliament wants to hear from the minister of finance, it's a minority parliament; they just call him in front of the finance committee,' Wernick said. Still, in light of the intense furor caused by the budget's delay, it's baffling why Carney invited such a storm. It didn't just dominate the first week of Question Period, it unleashed a slew of withering news articles and op-eds that articulated valid concerns about Carney's lack of transparency, all of it entirely predictable. The work of crafting a budget is contained within the finance department — completing one doesn't hamper the rest of the government's ability to pursue Carney's ambitious agenda — so why not just release one before summer and avoid the bad press? 'The charitable interpretation is they say, 'Hey, we're busy, life is uncertain, it's too hard to do, so we're gonna do it later,'' says Christopher Ragan. 'But the thing that I fear is that what's going on in their heads is: 'We can just do this more easily without a budget. The budget is complicated, the budget is very visible, the budget invites all kinds of analysis and criticism, and why don't we just proceed as much as we can and we'll just pass these appropriations bills, which get way less scrutiny.' And that is a view that is fairly disrespectful of the whole concept of parliament.' Heather McPherson says she expects the budget to contain bad news — news the Liberals would rather avoid delivering before they fan out across the country to gladhand their constituents. 'I think the advantage for them is they don't want to have a bad budget that they have to go out on the barbecue scene with,' was Heather McPherson's take. 'They don't want to have to go to Canadians with a budget that's going to be a hard pill to swallow, and stand at the [Calgary] Stampede and have to go to Canadians across the country all summer long with a bad budget. So they're going to hide and they're going to pretend everything is still sunny ways.' 'I think his intent, his strategic objective, is to buy himself a little bit of time,' says Ian Lee. 'There's going to be a logjam this September, October, November in parliament because there's going to be so many bills tabled in Parliament to implement his agenda. And so this will buy them four or five months to figure out, you know, which gets priority?' Of all the people Canada's National Observer spoke to, Lee was among the most critical of Carney's decision to delay the budget; Lee has worked in several developing nations around the world over the course of his career, and he pointed out that one hallmark of those governments is a slipshod approach to crafting budgets. But even he acknowledged that 'if [Carney] comes up with a really good, transparent budget this fall, I don't think everyone's even going to remember that they kicked the problem down the road.' Michael Wernick, for his part, takes what Carney said in Rome, and what Champagne told Politico, at face value. 'They must have just calculated that with all of the chaos around Trump's tariffs, and the NATO summit coming in June, which could just blow a big hole in sorts of all future forecasting, then, the shelf life of a June budget would be days or weeks.' My query to the PMO also directed me to Carney's Rome statement. 'I think that would be your best bet for a concise quote from him,' a press secretary told me. In the absence of more elaborate communication from the PMO on all this, Canadians must rely on the speculation of outside experts. And for voters and government alike, that lack of transparency may prove to be a bigger problem than the lack of a budget – especially if it becomes the new story by fall.
Ottawa Citizen
2 hours ago
- Ottawa Citizen
Kavanagh: Let's talk about a real Christmas market in the ByWard
In 2014, I moved back to Canada from the medieval city of York, settling in Ottawa. With the birth of my first daughter, I took paternity leave to savour those precious early years, a rare gift. It also gave me time to explore my new city. Article content Article content Having spent years in Europe, I had been captivated by the stunning Christmas markets. These gatherings, rich with history and atmosphere, transformed city squares into places of warmth and connection, alive with the scents of mulled wine, along with artisan crafts. As winter approached in Ottawa, I hoped to find that same festive energy. But aside from the twinkling lights in Confederation Park, the city felt largely unanimated, its historic streets quiet in the long, dark months. Article content Article content As someone who has spent a career bringing spaces to life, I felt that this was a call to action. I dreamed of creating a European-style holiday market for Ottawa, a place where families could make memories, where local businesses could thrive, and where the spirit of the season could come alive. Something akin to the Distillery District in Toronto, but with a distinctly Ottawa flair. Article content I dove into research, studying markets from across the globe, and developed what I called the National Holiday Festival. It was more than just a market; it was a statement about what Ottawa could be: a beacon of warmth in the cold, a place that Ottawans and visitors alike could come to love. Article content My first pitch was to the head of events for the city. In that meeting, I was handed blueprints for the then-unfinished Lansdowne Park, presented as the ideal site for the festival. I understood their excitement, but my heart was set on Sparks Street. Fresh from the United Kingdom, where pedestrian zones are cherished, I imagined transforming this historic stretch into a winter wonderland. Yet, the logistical challenges quickly became apparent. I was warned about the layers of government I would have to navigate, but I couldn't shake the feeling that this was the right spot. I could picture it: the glow of lights reflecting off the old brick facades, the sound of carollers echoing down the street, the warmth of bustling market stalls cutting the winter chill. Article content Article content Still, I began to second-guess myself. I wandered over to the ByWard Market, where I stood on York Street, facing the silhouette of the parliamentary library. This was it: a historic, vibrant space, surrounded by small businesses, the heart of the city. It felt right. This was the heart I wanted to bring to life. Article content Article content That's when I met Mathieu Fleury, a city councillor with a deep passion for the Market's potential. He shared my vision for a revitalized Market and encouraged my bold idea to pedestrianize the area, despite skeptics insisting it couldn't be done. Article content I even took a self-funded trip to Toronto to meet with Canadian Tire executives, with the goal of securing a sponsorship. They were intrigued, particularly with the sesquicentennial approaching in 2017. Support seemed within reach, and I had a clear path forward. With Fleury's help, I secured critical support from local BIAs, feeling the finish line in sight.
Japan Forward
3 hours ago
- Japan Forward
Setouchi Becomes the First Japanese City to Release an English-Language Integrated Report
Setouchi City in Okayama Prefecture is breaking new ground as one of Japan's first municipalities to publish an integrated report, according to the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun . This format, more commonly seen in the corporate world, combines financial data with broader insights on strategy, governance, and sustainability. The city's Setouchi City Integrated Report follows the internationally recognized framework set by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). In a notable move for a Japanese local government, Setouchi began releasing the report in English as of March 2025. The aim is to reach a wider audience and position the city as a forward-thinking model of transparency and global outreach. Setouchi City's Integrated Report City officials describe the report as a tool to communicate "fair and neutral" information, helping both residents and external stakeholders better understand Setouchi's goals, challenges, and achievements. It also serves as a way to highlight the city's broader appeal and strengthen its brand. Beyond its content, the process of compiling the report has brought together departments across city hall, fostering internal collaboration and promoting what officials call "integrated thinking." The English edition reinforces Setouchi's role as a unique case study for other municipalities in Japan looking to align governance with international standards and communicate more effectively on the global stage. New Flying Car Exhibition Opens in Kurashiki, Okayama
