All Consuming:
New column by San Francisco writer Chris Ying will explore the breadth of dining in the Bay Area.
Editor’s note: Welcome to All
Consuming, a new kind of Chronicle restaurant review column by Chris Ying, a San Francisco writer, editor and diner. This regular midweek series will explore the breadth of dining in the Bay Area. Enjoy. I’m new. Not new to town — not a native, either — but new to this newspaper.
I’ve called San Francisco home for the better part of two decades. I’m quick to defend the city and eager to point out why I’d rather live and eat here than New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or the rich, white part of Orange County where I grew up.
I love that San Francisco restaurants are brave, even when they are stupidly so. I
love our fanatical artisans and eccentric winemakers, our markets and the farmers that supply them. While our city has never had the same dazzling reputation for its immigrant-run restaurants as, say, Los Angeles or Houston, I love that there are still revelations of all kinds to be had around the Bay Area. I look for authentic experiences over authentic cuisine anyway.
But San Francisco is changing — that’s plain enough to see. It’s a city perpetually tumbling across savage and contradictory currents. It’s not the same place it was when I moved here, or the same place it was 10 years before that. “You should have seen it when …” is the rueful mantra of all San Franciscans.
It dawns on me that it’s been a long time since I really took stock of the city. I’m hoping that writing this regular restaurant column will be my opportunity to make sure the quirks and qualities that drew me to San Francisco are still here in some form.
Frankly, I’ve always shied away from reviewing restaurants, but that’s not to say I don’t see the value in thoughtful criticism. I believe that a good food critic not only steers diners toward better meals, but also helps restaurants see themselves more clearly. As for my specific purview, I think a San Francisco-based critic would do well to consider the wider world of eating, whether by expanding the range of restaurants we consider worth writing about; by bringing more of the North, South and East Bay into the fold; or by discussing the city’s restaurants in a global context. Anyway, that’s what I told my editor I’m going to attempt to do here.
But before we get to all that, let me lay my cards on the table:
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 17 years — San Francisco proper for all but two of those. I came for school but spent the majority of my college days working as a line cook at a now-closed Berkeley restaurant called Downtown. I kept cooking for a little while after school — notably with friends who opened one of the first pop-ups in America, Mission Street Food — but I stopped, because I wasn’t talented enough to pursue it seriously. For seven years I worked at San Francisco’s best-loved and starriest-eyed publishing house, McSweeney’s. Then in 2011 I met a writer and a chef from New York, and I left to start a food magazine with them called Lucky Peach.
A good percentage of my time in the Bay Area has been spent in the company of chefs. I call some of them friends, and I’m friendly with others. I’ve had meals at their restaurants at their expense, traveled and cooked with them, and written and edited their cookbooks. If I walk into Mission Chinese Food, Tartine Manufactory, Saison, Coi or In Situ, I will most likely know someone working there and they will know me.
On numerous occasions in the past six years, I’ve taken up festival organizers and tourism agencies on offers to travel to foreign countries to speak at conferences, or, more often, just to mess around.
I mention all this partly as a sort of offense-is-the-best-defense strategy. I’m hoping to avoid anyone complaining later that I lied about my objectivity or my professional entanglements. (Suffice to say, I will always be transparent about those, and I won’t accept any freebies for this column.) But I also mention it because I think that the breadth of my dining experiences and my affinity with industry folk make me specially qualified to tell you about what’s good to eat.
I find it instructive to see Danny Bowien leading a ragtag pack of friends up a steep section of Jones Street to Shalimar, rhapsodizing all the way about the smoky, spicy goat curry that awaits us. I love that he orders an extra portion so he can Cryovac it and bring it back with him to New York.
It fills me with equal parts shame and delight that right under my nose at Hamano, my neighborhood California-rolls-and-chicken-teriyaki Japanese restaurant, there was a chef named Jiro Lin making sushi with such skill and diligence that one of his regulars, Saison chef Joshua Skenes, lured him out of relative obscurity to open a spectacular but short-lived omakase counter of his own. ( Jiro is back at Hamano, by the way, serving what is probably the best sushi in San Francisco.)
So if you’ll forgive me for bending and breaking some of the cardinal rules of restaurant criticism, I’ll continue to be honest and forthright about why and how I like to eat in the Bay Area.
Here, as a gesture of good faith, are some bits of wisdom I’ve accrued over the years but largely kept to myself:
I’m convinced that continuing to list the boat noodles and congee only in Thai on a “secret” chalkboard menu is a gimmick at this point, but I forgive the staff of Zen Yai (771 Ellis St.) because they don’t blink when I order an extra half-bowl of noodles to round out my lunch.
My favorite birthday cake is the tres leches from the Mission’s Dragon City Bakery (2367 Mission St.).
My go-to orders are the No. 26 (dry pho) at Pho Tan Hoa (431 Jones St.) and the No. 5 at Cordon Bleu (1574 California St.) — plus an extra imperial roll “for my wife.”
Street cred dictates that I say I like the tacos best at La Taqueria (2889 Mission St.), but my heart really beats for, and with more difficulty because of, the burrito. My order: carnitas (and chorizo, if I’m feeling selfdestructive) and the green salsa, not the red; cooked dorado.
The pan-fried daikon cake at Koi Palace (365 Gellert Blvd., Daly City) is a solid rendition of a dim sum classic, but the real revelation and my particular jam is the steamed version.
You should already know to add a little spice to your burger by requesting a bag of unadvertised pickled chiles from behind the counter at In-N-Out .I order them chopped and slipped into my double-double — they’ll also chop the raw white onions for you, if you want — along with extra-welldone fries.
They have different numbers on their respective menus but the house noodles (Hu Tieu Nghiep Ky and Hu Tieu Hai Ky) at Thai Nghiep Ky Mi Gia (1427 Noriega St.) and Hai Ky Mi Gia (707 Ellis St.) are essentially the same dish: wide rice noodles in a light, fishy broth, with ground and sliced pork, pork offal, shrimp crackers, and fish balls that are heavily dosed with white pepper. Many regulars opt for the braised duck leg with egg noodles (soup on the side), but the house specialty speaks to me on a primal level.
It’s Teochew food, from a southeastern province of China where my great-grandmother lived, as well as the babysitter who watched me when I was a toddler. The first thing I can remember eating is a bowl of fat, slippery rice noodles with minced pork and fish balls. Maybe it’s psychosomatic, but with very little effort, I can conjure the acrid-sweet smell of said babysitter’s Chinese cigarettes and imagine those noodles exactly as they were.
If the same blend of pork and fermented fish sauce and nostalgia speaks to you, I think we’ll get along fine.