Home Care In Greenwood Village, CO

The hard-to-find fried dough yóutiáo is the centerpiece of this spread.

January 14, 2025

Share this:

Audio By Carbonatix

As soon as I saw the photo on Facebook, my mouth started salivating. Pictured were two lumpscious, golden yóutiáo as long as my forearm next to bowls of soy milk, crispy rice cake and purple rice cifantuan wrapped in cellophane. It was unbelievable — a true old-style Chinese breakfast, one that's rare to see being served in a restaurant. I even had trouble finding it last time I was in central Shanghai, a city where the residents' palates have grown more sophisticated than the simple breakfast that my mother’s generation ate every day.

And this photo was taken at a restaurant in the metro area?!

It's true. You can now find this spread from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. every Saturday and Sunday at Chilgogi Korean BBQ, located at 9666 East Arapahoe Road in Greenwood Village.

“It’s quite a story. We’re actually four families...there’s seven of us,” explains Connie Wang, one of the people behind the breakfast. The concept started quite unintentionally between Wang and her three closest girlfriends. All four love cooking and eating, and would often post their meals on Facebook and WeChat. When Wang posted a Chinese breakfast spread her friend had made on her WeChat, the comments started flooding in. “They say, ‘Wow, is it possible we can be invited? Can we taste it?’ And I say, ‘She’s my friend, she cannot serve a large group.’ But the ladies kept pressing; they said they wanted to buy from her.”

The four friends were convinced the idea had potential, and they considered finding a commercial kitchen so they could share the food with the community. While discussing their plans at a Fourth of July party, they decided to loop in their husbands — one of whom is Tony Jin, owner of Chilgogi Korean BBQ. ”When they had this idea, they really wanted to do it, so I say, okay, you can just do it in my restaurant,” explains Jin, who opened Chilgogi five years ago.

He and the other six friends behind the new breakfast spread are ethnically Chinese, but he opted to open a fast-casual, build-your-own bowl concept focused on Korean barbecue flavors because he saw a gap in the area's restaurant scene.

Helen Xu

Each member of the group has had accomplished careers since immigrating to the United States. “We all have our master’s [degrees]. There’s a Ph.D. Some of us are retired now, but most of us worked in IT. There’s an electrical engineer,” Wang notes.

At this point, most have lived in the U.S. longer than they lived in China, but food from childhood always has a nostalgic appeal. For Chinese immigrants, one of the most elusive dishes to find in the U.S. is yóutiáo, the quintessential Chinese breakfast staple.

Simplistically, yóutiáo is fried dough. Sometimes referred to as Chinese doughnuts, fried breadsticks or even Chinese churros, it’s really none of those things. The closest comparison might be a savory deep-fried cruller. Its Cantonese name literally translates to “oil-fried devil,” and like many Chinese dishes, it has a drama-filled backstory dating back to the Song dynasty.

It's made with simple ingredients like flour, egg, salt, baking soda, water and fat, but the process of making it is labor-intensive and time-consuming, and it's really only good when it's hot and fresh. Even in China, people rarely bother making it at home, instead picking it up from street vendors on their way to school or work.

As a low-margin product that requires a twenty-hour overnight rise, it’s rare to find in America. “Just to get good yóutiáo, [my husband] and I would fly to Los Angeles,” laughs Wang. At high altitudes, the pastry process becomes even more complex. To ensure the best quality, the friends found that hand-kneading the dough was essential for achieving the light, fluffy texture and big air pockets characteristic of high-quality yóutiáo. A good sign of quality? Squeeze the yóutiáo: The dough should be elastic enough to bounce back to its original shape, ensuring it's got a chewy texture and the absorbability needed to soak up soy milk or porridge.

Recognizing the labor-intensive process and slim profit margins, “we didn’t have the idea of doing as a business; we still do as more like a hobby,” explains Wang. So in July 2023, the group made a huge batch of yóutiáo in Chilgogi’s kitchen and invited their friends to come in, try it and provide feedback. The response was overwhelming: Everyone urged them to keep going. And so they did. Every Saturday morning, subsets of the seven friends would wake up early and work the kitchen and registers.

Over time, word spread among the Chinese community that there was a place doing an amazing, authentic Chinese breakfast, and the crowds started rolling in. Eating a fresh piece of yóutiáo is highly emotional for many Chinese immigrants, some of whom might not have gotten the chance to bite into the bouncy pastry since leaving China. "One of my friends told me the moment she bit into yóutiáo, just bring back the memories of her grandmother and all the jokes and stories that happened on the way to school in China,” says Wang. When we visited, 100 percent of the tables were filled with Chinese families, and the only language we heard was Mandarin.

As the breakfast crowds grew, the friends began adding more items to the menu, including soft tofu pudding, crispy rice cakes and cifantuan (rice rolls stuffed with yóutiáo as well as a savory combination of pork floss and pickled vegetables or a sweet version made with sugar and black sesame). The most recent addition is shaobing (stuffed flatbreads).

The spread is intentionally more bland than its Western breakfast counterparts and is instead focused on digestive comfort, condiments, practicality and speed. Though most of the food is unfamiliar to non-Asian Coloradans, the owners are hoping its popularity will spread beyond the Chinese community.

“For [non-Asians] who come here, they’re willing to try something different, and I tell them, you don’t need to follow the way we eat, how we eat,” Wang explains. That attitude was on full display when we visited and my Caucasian dining partner took the crispy rice cake, which Chinese people eat plain or with some sugar and peanuts, and happily dunked it into a tub of chili oil while Wang nodded and asked curiously, “It’s good? You like that?”

While the breakfast was listed on Chilgogi's website at one point, it started to confuse the restaurant's regulars, so it was removed, though word continues to spread via WeChat and certain Facebook groups. There's no official name for it, either, and “Chinese Breakfast at Chilgogi on Saturdays and Sundays” doesn't really roll off the tongue. But after half a year of running the business and ironing out the kinks of working with friends — they partake in a democratic voting system — “we’re getting serious," Jin says. "We just registered as a business [in December 2024]. It’s called Joy Lounge. ... It’s going to be [at Chilgogi] initially, but we’re also thinking about doing it as a pop-up restaurant."

Regardless of any future location change, the quality will remain the same. “The menu was based on our own appetite. We can only make the menu that we know, and our mindset is we only want to deliver the product we want to eat. We have a very high standard,” Wang says.

“This is a very type of Chinese thing. ... Most people, I think they try it, they may like it. So just try it. If you are interested in China, this is a part of our culture that we do. And for Chinese people, it means so much," Jin concludes.

The acquisition marks the Florida-based company’s entrance into the Colorado real estate market.

A Florida-based private equity real estate firm has expanded into Colorado through the acquisition of an almost 159,300-square-foot retail center in Greenwood Village.

Sterling Organization purchased The Orchards, 5926 S. Holly St., for $42.6 million, a special warranty deed filed in Arapahoe County shows.

The shopping center, at the intersection of East Orchard Road and South Holly Street, is anchored by a 78,000-square-foot King Soopers grocery store.

The property was purchased through the company’s institutional fund, Sterling United Properties II. The $267 million equity fund focuses on investments in stable grocery-anchored shopping centers, the company says.

The Sterling Organization spent a decade educating itself on the Denver market prior to the purchase, Brian Kosoy, managing principal and CEO of the company, said in an announcement.

“We believe our patience and discipline have paid off, as The Orchards is a grocery-anchored asset in the Denver market, serving what is one of its most dynamic and affluent submarkets in the MSA,” Kosoy said.

The SUP II fund now owns 16 properties that encompass approximately 2 million square feet of gross leasable area.

Other tenants at The Orchards include VCA Animal Hospitals, State Farm, Homefest and Beau Visage, the company’s website states.

The seller was Iowa-based Principal Financial Group, which purchased the property for $38 million in 2017, records show.

Brad Lyons and CBRE assisted the transaction, which Jordan Fried, principal of Sterling Organization, called "a very smooth experience.”

The Sterling Organization has $2 billion of assets under its management, owning 75 properties across the country, its website shows.

Other metro-area retail centers have been sold in recent months, including another one in Greenwood Village last summer.

An Edgewater market property traded hands for $25.5 million earlier this month, and over the summer an Arvada retail center fetched even more in a sale.

Commercial Real Estate Brokerages by Dollar Amount Brokered

2023 Denver-area sales brokered

View this list