Since moving back to Halifax in late 2024, I've heard nothing but good things about Yilan, and one…read moreday at work I finally made the short walk to pickup some takeout for lunch.
I opted for the Xinjiang wide, hand-pulled noodles, with beef as the protein. If a place is doing hand-made noodles, ya gotta try them!
My order was ready quite quickly and on time.
Taking my hefty container back to the office, I sat down at my desk and tried to move things out of the immediate noodle-splatter-zone.
Unsurprisingly, given the area of origin (and the more descriptively-labeled, in-house menu vs Uber Eats where I ordered) cumin features very prominently in the dish. I also appreciated the broader assortment of ingredients, with tomato and garlic scapes showing up, in addition to more familiar sights like onion and cabbage. A side cup of chili crisp let's you amp up the spice level to your own taste, although I suspect that there's a little heat to begin with as well.
The noodles themselves were excellent. A good thickness, with a pleasant chew and a rough texture that held the sauce well, there was nothing to not like here!
The beef was a bit on the over-cooked side, but being in a takeout container for ten minutes or more isn't optimal for any food.
It was a big container, so I opted to keep a small portion for lunch the next day, rather than completely ruin my afternoon energy levels by having the whole thing.
My text time there had me coming by with my wife, and my aunt and one of her friends, which allowed for a much larger spread of food to sample.
We started off the meal with the cucumber salad and an order of pan-fried chicken and mushroom dumplings. The crunchy chunks of cucumber had a nice punch of garlic and sesame flavour, and would help balance out later dishes that packed a spicy hit. The dumplings had pleasantly pliable wrappers with nice browning, and the juicy chicken and earthy wood ear mushrooms made for a tasty filling.
For our mains, we went with the beef and garlic scapes, the lamb and green onion, as well as the dry-fried green beans. Naturally, steamed rice would be the blank canvas for all of this good stuff. Yilan's menu is fully halal and leans into the owner's Uyghur origins, which is not only a great culinary option for local Muslims, but results in some very unique offerings. The beef and garlic scapes was certainly one of those dishes, one that I haven't seen anywhere else in the city. Given my wife's dietary restrictions, it was also a pleasant surprise. The crispy pieces of garlic scapes were potently garlicky but with their own vegetal brightness, and they played well against the tender slices of beef. Pieces of wood ear mushrooms and dried chili peppers added further savouriness and bursts of heat, if you choose to go down that fiery red path.
The lamb with green onions was the milder of the lamb options on the menu, with the familiar cumin lamb as the other. The lamb was wonderfully tender, and very mild in flavour - if you're not a fan of lamb's bolder meatiness in other preparations, this is the lamb dish for you. Slices of green onion brought a little green and crunch to the dish, but the lamb was certainly the star.
The dry-fried green beans got the Sichuan treatment as they were absolutely swimming in a massive pile of Sichuan peppercorns and pieces of dried chilies. The numbing peppercorns and spicy peppers added big flavour to an otherwise benign dish, and there was an impressive amount of both peppercorns and peppers left on the plate after we scooped the leftovers in containers to take home.
Yilan isn't just a big fish in a small pond; whether you're looking for a halal meal or just really good Chinese food, they're doing an impressively fantastic job while they add to the depth of Halifax's food scene.
