Junzi: The restaurant run by Yalies

With its white brick walls, floor to ceiling windows and hanging potted plants, Junzi looks more like an Anthropologie store than a Chinese takeout joint.

But that is exactly what the Junzi team wanted to create: a restaurant that breaks the mould of traditional fast food stops. The Tab sat down with Lucas Sin, DC Class of ’15 and head chef at Junzi, to talk about this new business.

You were a Cognitive Science major. So what did you do at Yale that inspired you to go into the food industry?

Well I’ve been making food since I was 16 and the kitchen is where I spend most of my time, so I sort of came to Yale doing food; it’s the only thing I know how to do.

When I was a sophomore, I founded Yale Pop-Up (the group that puts together different student-run restaurants every semester) with my friend. At first, it was just making food for our friends, which was fun. But then we began to take ourselves a little more seriously and it grew really quickly. Now I’m serving real people in the real world… It just seemed like a natural transition.

What would you say is the best thing about Yale Pop-Up?

It’s a question of getting Yale kids to use their hands a little more instead of using their heads because there’s something to be found in the fruits of your labor. No pun intended.

How many members of the Junzi team are Yale graduates?

LS: There are two School of Forestry graduates who are married, one MFA grad and me.

How would you describe Junzi?

Well, technically it’s Chinese fast food. We make food. It comes out fast. That qualifies us as fast food.

The main twist is that we serve Northern Chinese food, which isn’t the type of Chinese food you’ll get everywhere. Most of the American Chinese food comes from the South, like Szechuan, but we’ve moved more towards the north where there’s more grain-based foods. Theres a good amount of interesting history to do with Northern Chinese food and it’s extremely unique in terms of grain manipulation as opposed to rice manipulation.

So basically, Junzi is not like other Chinese restaurants. I mean, you’ll look around this place and find that there’s not a piece of sesame chicken in sight.

There were some really cool murals outside of Junzi during construction. Was there some sort of purpose behind those, or were they just for fun?

There wasn’t really a reason for it, we just thought, why not do cool things if you have the canvas for it? Literally. The wall was blank, so our designer said, “Hey, let’s do something here”, and she painted a self portrait of the team. Then after a while a couple of artists passed by and this one guy, Peter, is really into graffiti art and asked if he could draw on it and it just ended up being really cool.

I think that’s metaphorically speaking why I love the fact that the walls are white. You just look at these spaces and you’re like, okay, what is blank and what can I fill in to make it a little more interesting. Why not do things the way you want them to be done?

Photo courtesy of Yong Zhao