In 1980, in the city of Guiyang in southwestern China, a widow named Yang lost her husband at 30 years old. She had five children to raise. She started with one charcoal stall.
That stall became Yang’s Smokehouse, now open in Plano at 240 Legacy Dr #306, inside the Mitsuya Marketplace center. The path from a single grill to a Texas strip mall took 40 years, three generations, and one very determined grandmother.
Grandma Yang built her recipes around two rules. The meat had to be real, no shortcuts. The spice blends stayed secret, hand-crushed, never written down for outsiders. That combination eventually grew into six locations across China, turning out roughly 10,000 skewers a day at peak.
Her youngest daughter learned the business next. Then her granddaughter, Candice Cao, took it further still. Cao came to Dallas more than a decade ago to attend Dallas Baptist University. She stayed, and she brought the family recipes with her.
Three generations, one recipe book, now sitting in a Plano shopping center that used to house a barbecue joint called Friendship BBQ. Cao has spoken publicly about carrying on a family tradition of women running their own business, and the restaurant itself reads like proof of that, built entirely on what her grandmother started.
Grandma Yang didn’t just hand over the recipes and stay home. She traveled to Texas herself to help launch the location, working the kitchen floor directly during opening. She doesn’t speak English. It didn’t stop her from coaching the team, standing at the grill, showing rather than telling.
The skewers are the obvious draw. Sliced beef, pork belly, lamb, chicken wings, beef tongue, sausage, mini pork ribs, pork skin, duck gizzard. Vegetable versions too: green beans, cabbage, eggplant, zucchini, lotus root. All of it cooked over live fire and real wood smoke, the same method Grandma Yang used on her original charcoal stall.
The menu goes further than skewers, though. This is also a showcase for Guizhou province cooking, a regional Chinese cuisine that barely exists on North Texas menus.
The spicy stir-fried clams come in a black bean sauce loaded with garlic, ginger, scallion, and cilantro. The crispy tofu balls are a Guizhou street snack: crisp tofu skin wrapped around a soft mashed tofu center, dressed with radish and spices, then fried, best eaten with the accompanying spicy dipping sauce worked into the center.
Then there’s the dish most first-time visitors have never seen on a menu anywhere: Spicy and Numbing Chicken Knee Cartilage. It’s exactly what it sounds like, the small joint connecting drumstick to foot, prepared with a heavy dose of Sichuan-style heat that leaves a numbing sensation behind. It’s the kind of dish familiar to many Chinese diners but rarely offered anywhere in North Texas, let alone attempted by non-Chinese eaters.
For anyone who wants to ease in first, the menu also runs through more familiar ground. Grilled vegetables, fried rice, stir-fry, noodles, ribs. An “Adventurous Eats” section pushes further still, including spicy roasted pig brain for anyone ready to go all the way.
Yang’s Smokehouse isn’t trying to be a fusion restaurant or a Western-friendly version of Chinese barbecue. It’s a direct transplant, recipes intact, grandmother included. That’s rare enough on its own. In North Texas, it might be one of a kind.
