An Architect’s Evening Passion

After spending years as a single cog in the massive redesign of a major international airport, Yuyi Zhou (B.ARCH. ’20) experienced a creative rebirth.

It was a small project, and one close to home: designing a restaurant that would shed preconceived notions of Chinese cuisine, in an area of Chicago that was, in her opinion, stuck in a design rut.

“People in America have an impression of a Chinese restaurant with no midpoint. Either it’s really upscale or really cheap and greasy with no customer experience,” says Zhou. “Lots of red colors, and not even an authentic Chinese taste. Most people don’t even want to dine in.”

So when Zhou and her wife, Lili Ma (M.A.S. MCOM ’12), opened YooYee—a restaurant in Chicago’s Little Saigon neighborhood that is a play on Zhou’s first name—they fully expected it to just be another carryout restaurant.

The dated space, which once housed a Thai/sushi fusion restaurant, had little foot traffic and was surrounded by mostly family-owned Vietnamese restaurants with what Ma called “grandma-grandpa service. They didn’t care about their decor or service, and it was all carryout.”

But in Zhou’s off-hours from her day job at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, she took a deep dive into restaurant design—something she’d never attempted. At SOM, as an intermediate designer, she helped with the redesign of two concourses at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport,

Unlike the O’Hare project, she could think holistically about the entire space and its purpose. “As an architect, you learn to think about everything. The most important thing is how you experience it,” Zhou says. “The restaurant is basically my own experimental space. You have to think about a lot of details you don’t usually think about.”

Zhou tackled not only YooYee’s interior, but its menu, uniforms, and ordering system as well. She interviewed the restaurant’s chefs about whether they wanted to be observed, and left space open to see the kitchen. Instead of bright red, she chose softer browns for the walls and rebuilt the height of the wall benches. And she designed a unique, playful fold-out menu with stylized art that offers information on Chinese dynasties.  

“When I think about the menu, I think of my architecture portfolio. The logic was the same,” Zhou says.

She also added sophisticated touches, such as purchasing intricate overhead lights she saw portrayed at a fancy resort on the HBO show White Lotus.

“We had a lot of arguments about that,” Ma laughs. “Architects, sometimes they don’t care about costs. They want a masterpiece.”

Judging from YouYee’s reviews and popularity since its March 2025 opening, Zhou and Ma pulled off something masterful.  

Instead of relying on carryout, the restaurant is now packed on nights and weekends, particularly following a glowing review from popular blog Infatuation, which notes “YooYee’s minimalist look, neutral tones, and calming piano soundtrack might initially make you think ‘spa day.’” Positive and well-populated Reddit threads followed, including one calling YooYee “the best Szechuan restaurant in Chicago.”

Ma, who opened the now-closed Peppercorn Kitchen in Evanston, Illinois, after graduation before recently opening a second restaurant, Koi, just down the street from Peppercorn’s location in Evanston, notes that Zhou’s design was much different from the consultant she hired to help her design Peppercorn.

“Their design was like a factory line. Copy and paste from a template,” Ma yells over a busy Saturday lunch rush at YooYee, pausing to smile at the crowd. “Not this, it’s very different.”

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For Zhou’s master’s degree thesis in architecture from Yale University, which she attended after graduating from Illinois Tech, she created a board game, with hand-crafted pieces and a board representing Chicago neighborhoods. The goal was to “activate” every neighborhood with development projects.

She points to YooYee’s successful launch and says, “We thought it was going to be a takeout place, but now feel we’re helping the neighborhood. It’s just like my thesis: it’s about activating the neighborhood, and we actually did it!”

As a child, Zhou started school in China at the age of five (seven is typical) and skipped a year to graduate from high school at the age of 16. She took a few years off, residing in the city of Ningbo, China, while also sitting in on lectures at Tongji University in Shanghai, which was more than an hour away.  

Finding herself the most interested in lectures on architecture, she enrolled at Illinois Tech at age 19. After graduating from Yale, she was hired at SOM as a junior designer in 2022 and met Ma through a mutual friend the following year.

In addition to YooYee, she’s still working at SOM, with her current projects focused in the health care industry, including a new cancer center for the Intermountain Medical Center in Utah.  

But the restaurant is where she goes to relax.

“For my 9–5 job, I have to be really corporate. But at night I like to be myself, serve drinks, and talk to normal people,” she laughs. “I don’t think a lot of architects could do this. You don’t think of an architect running food and clearing tables. Architects are dreamy.”