I was in the middle of looking over some layouts when a coworker popped her head into my office to tell me I had a visitor in the front foyer.
I walk down the hall, mind racing, trying to figure out who could have dropped in to see me. Had I forgotten a scheduled interview? Or was a disgruntled reader here to give me a piece of his mind? I was starting to feel like this was going to be one of those Mondays I could do without.
I turned the corner, instead, to find a well-groomed man in a sharp suit carrying a large bag of takeout food. He smiled and told me he was with yumitogo.com, a new Asian fusion café in the neighborhood, and he’d brought me a sampling of their menu. Suddenly, this Monday was starting to look a lot better.
I wasted no time in putting the word out to our editorial and production staffers that there was free lunch in the break room. Within 10 minutes, we had an impromptu Advocate review/photo shoot well underway.
We started with the ahi tuna spring rolls (photographed below by our fabulous photo editor Can Turkyilmaz), which are somewhat like a delicious sushi-egg roll hybrid. You get that fresh fish taste from the flash-fried tuna, plus you get that crispy outer crust—a combo that works well. 
After that we shared the dishes family-style, sampling a little of everything. The crowd favorite was the R&G beef (photographed below). Tender chunks of beef are stir-fried with mushrooms and asparagus in a light brown sauce, with a side of fried rice. The dish wasn’t too greasy, and you just can’t go wrong with beef and mushrooms. 
The runner-up was the grilled Thai chicken skewers served over a cold Thai noodle salad in peanut sauce (pictured below). The chicken was in some sort of mildly sweet sauce—which we thought was a nice complement to the spicy noodle salad.
My personal favorite, however, was the sesame snap chicken, wok-seared sesame-coated chicken in a sweet-and-sour sauce with broccoli and red bell peppers (pictured below). It was a bit too tangy for some of my co-workers, but I thought it was right on. Hey, different strokes, right?
I should also mention that seven of us staffers comfortably ate off the five dishes they sent. In fact, there’re even some leftovers in the break room fridge. No doubt, you get a good-sized portion for about $8.
The big idea behind yumitogo.com is quality Asian food you can order, hence the “to go” part of their name. The café is located off Inwood and Lemon and delivers to Uptown, Downtown, Oaklawn, and Preston Hollow. We here are the Advocate are certainly happy they made a surprise delivery because while there were some dishes we liked more than others, there weren’t any that we flat out didn’t like. As one co-worker put it, “even their rice is good.”
Oh, and if any of you PR reps are out there reading this: Sending us free food is always better than sending a press release, just for future reference.
