New sushi along 23rd Street, new Chinese along Iowa Street; rumors of KC restaurant chain coming to town; figures show positive Kansas income growth

There are new adventures to be had in Lawrence with chopsticks, and this time I’m almost sure it won’t require a trip to the ear, nose and throat doctor. In other words, there’s news about some new Japanese and Chinese restaurants in the city.

Yeah Sushi has opened in the Malls Shopping Center at 23rd and Louisiana streets. Yuyuan Jiang is the owner of the restaurant, and he told me he’s been a sushi chef for the past eight years in places such as California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida and New York.

“My sushi style is coming from many different states,” he said.

In fact, Yeah’s menu includes a sushi roll for almost every state. (In fact, it would be dead on, if geographers would quit insisting that we recognize Missouri.) By my count, the menu has 49 different sushi rolls. There are plenty of traditional ones such as the spicy tuna roll, the Philadelphia roll, the Yellowtail scallion roll, the California roll and the rainbow roll.

But there are also some with more local flair. There’s a KU roll, which has salmon, crab meat and avocado, and there is a Lawrence roll, which has crab meat, shrimp, cucumber, tempura flakes and eel sauce. (That sounds about right. Every time I’ve ever met an eel here, he’s been sauced.)

The restaurant also has about a dozen salads — ranging from a house salad to more creative ones like a salmon skin salad or a seaweed salad. There are lots of other things on the menu that I’m probably not the best at explaining. (After all, I was worried about Rudolph when I saw a Christmas roll on the menu.) But my understanding is my colleague Joanna Hlavecek is writing a little something about the restaurant, so keep an eye out for that at Lawrence.com.

I have two other quick updates from the land of Far East cuisine. There’s a new Chinese restaurant called Xi’an Kitchen in the location that used to house the Asian restaurant 8 Flavors. That’s near the intersection of 23rd and Iowa, behind the building that houses the West Coast Saloon. I haven’t yet chatted with the owners of that establishment, but we’ll reach out to them.

And one more note, and this one comes from Lawrence’s Far East, which is 23rd and Harper. The Jin Shan Buffet that is located at the shopping center at the northeast corner of the intersection is closed. But a sign on the restaurant says it will reopen. According to the sign, there was a fire in the kitchen of Jin Shan several weeks ago. The sign wasn’t clear on when the restaurant will reopen, but there was a large Dumpster from a local fire restoration company on site. I’ll let you know if I hear more.


In other news and notes from around town:

• It would take a big pair of chopsticks to tackle a moose, but I’m hearing rumblings that the popular KC-based restaurant Blue Moose Bar and Grill is seriously considering a Lawrence location.

I’ve reached out to the company, but haven’t yet heard back. So this falls into the category of unconfirmed, and you can take it for whatever you think it is worth. But there is definitely talk on the street that the Blue Moose Bar & Grill is working on a deal for a northwest Lawrence location. I’ve heard that the site next to Spin Neapolitan Pizza, which is locating next to the Wal-Mart near Sixth and Wakarusa is a potential site, but again I don’t have confirmation from the company on that.

For those of you not familiar with the Blue Moose, it is not your typical bar and grill food. There are certainly some hamburgers and buffalo chicken and that sort of stuff, but there’s also salmon, pastas, flat bread pizzas, gourmet mac and cheese and other such items. My understanding is the locations also serve brunch.

The restaurant has locations in Prairie Village, Overland Park, Topeka and Lenexa.

Again, I wouldn’t pull the moose antlers out of the closet just yet, but it is a restaurant to keep an eye on. I’ll let you know if I hear more.


• There’s some economic news out that is not bad for the state of Kansas. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has a new report out that says personal income in the state grew faster than it did many other parts of the country, and, to boot, Kansas is a quite a bit cheaper place to live.

The numbers are for 2013, but those are the latest numbers available, so we’ll take what we can get. The federal number crunchers found that personal income — that’s things like wages, rental income, Social Security payments and a host of other things — rose by 1.1 percent in Kansas, after adjusted for inflation. That’s better than the 0.8 percent rise for the U.S. as a whole.

What’s more, Kansas did better than many of the other states in the region in 2013. (Note: This is the growth rate for total Kansas personal income, not per capita personal capita income.) Here’s a look:

• Colorado: up 1.0 percent

• Iowa: up 0.6 percent

• Missouri: up 0.5 percent

• Nebraska: up 2.2 percent

• Oklahoma: up 0.7 percent.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis also does a neat thing where it tries to show how far a dollar goes in each state. It uses an index that is similar to the popular Consumer Price Index to measure how much the price of goods and services are changing. What it found for Kansas is that prices are about 10 percent cheaper here than they are compared with the country as a whole.

Here’s a look at how we compare with other states. The key to understanding these numbers is that 100 is the national average. So a score of 90 would mean we’re 10 percent below the national average on prices, while 110 would mean we’re 10 percent above the national average on prices, for example.

• Kansas: 90.8

• Colorado: 102.2

• Iowa: 90.3

• Missouri: 89.2

• Nebraska: 90.5

• Oklahoma: 89.9

The report also lists per capita income amounts for metro areas across the country. I’m still accessing some of that data, and I’ll bring you more later. But the quick version for Lawrence is that per capita personal income stood at $36,187, up from $36,048 in 2012. That’s an increase of 0.3 percent. I’ll get you some comparisons to other communities as I get through the data a bit more.