Yu Cake

We love visiting dessert shops: Even when we travel, we are always willing to go out of the way to see and taste locally special pastries, especially if a bakery is serving something we can’t find in Orange County. So we were very excited when South Coast Plaza announced the opening of Yu Cake, a shop that originated in Los Angeles and has done a good job with social media showing off individual cakes that looked really nice.

But after a long wait for the opening, we found the overall experience to be thoroughly disappointing, from the use of space to its ordering process to the individual desserts. With a large touchscreen monitor placed awkwardly next to its lightly staffed counter and cake displays, Yu Cake has no air of hospitality; your first experience will be to wonder whether you should be standing in line or using the screen to place an order.

On our first visit to the restaurant, very soon after it opened, we were so underwhelmed by the sparsely filled display cases full of small, expensive cake slices that we left without buying anything. A month or two later, we returned to give it another shot, hoping that it would have improved somewhat. It hadn’t, but we pushed forward anyway to see if the flavors were anything special enough to justify the prices.

Short version: they were not. We were initially excited to try pretty much anything blue Yu Cake was offering, because their social media posts had done a nice job of making them stand out. So we started with an iced blueberry cheesecake, which turned out to be a pinkish “berry mousse” under blue-colored “coconut cheese,” neither particularly memorable in flavor.