San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Asian Art Museum cafe, reinvented
On a Thursday in late May, not long after the workday ended, Hien Huynh, Five Feet Dance and other poets and musicians were checking microphone levels in the second-floor hall of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. Their audience was trickling into the lobby and eddying around the ground floor, slipping into the “Divine Bodies” exhibition that inspired the performance about to begin.
Meanwhile, in the museum cafe, a waiter circled the communal table at the heart of the white-walled dining room, hawking raw oysters to the tables around the periphery of the room. In the open kitchen, chef Deuki Hong showed his crew how to plate the night’s specials, such as clam noodles with miso butter and crispy pork belly bo ssam.
Evening meals aren’t exactly a new dimension for the Asian Art Museum, whose cafe, up until two months ago, was more a side benefit than a draw in itself. But the institution has brought on Andrew Chau and Bin Chen, owners of Boba Guys, and Hong, chef of a tiny Fillmore pop-up called Sunday Bird, to exert their own gravitational pull.
There’s no doubt Sunday at the Museum, as their new effort is called, has the potential to be a better museum cafe, and its Thursday nights to develop their own following. Can the cafe — should it — be a vehicle for the museum’s mission as well?
With the exception of a packet of freeze-dried ice cream I once begged my parents for at the National Air and Space Museum, I’ve primarily experienced museum restaurants as corrals for underdressed salads, overdressed salads and inappropriately priced sandwiches.
That has been changing. “Museums in general have started to really think about their visitors as people who are going to come back to their institutions over and over again,” says Christine Anagnos, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors.
In 2004, two new cafes helped shift how we see, or visit, museum restaurants. The first was the luxe Dining Room at the Modern in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which treated food as an art form in its own right. At Mitsitam Cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., chef Freddie Bitsoie treated food as another part of the exhibit, on his menu representing indigenous food traditions from all across the Americas.
The Bay Area, not surprisingly, has joined in. Corey Lee’s In Situ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art serves reproductions of other chefs’ best-known dishes, making the brain arc between the plate and the gallery walls. The Museum of the African Diaspora’s chef-in-residence, Bryant Terry, coordinates dinners, panels and cooking events in schools. In its new location, the Berkeley Art Museum cafe, Babette, hosts monthly dinners attuned to screenings at the Pacific Film Archive.
The Asian Art Museum has taken on food programming, too, in the form of monthly Tasting Menu events. (At the next one, on June 21, Real Food Real Stories’ Pei-Ru Ko leads a discussion of food and health.)
Museum chief operating officer Joanne Chou says that when staff reviewed proposals from prospective cafe operators, they responded to the Sunday group’s youthful energy and Chau and Chen’s entrepreneurial drive. They even liked the fact that Sunday Bird, Hong’s takeout window in the Boba Guys’ Fillmore store, was a pop-up. “That was very attractive because it gave us a sense of their creativity and willingness to push the envelope more.”
Hong started his career in New York City, where he cooked for David Chang and Jean-Georges Vongerichten before taking over a large Korean barbecue in Manhattan called Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong. There, he captured the admiration of well-known chefs — and Eater, which named him one of the publication’s Young Guns in 2015. Just two years later, Hong, then 27, left New York and his stable job for San Francisco, where he hooked up with the Boba Guys, which now has 12 locations in the Bay Area and the East Coast.
The new space is, in many ways, a risk for both sides. When Chau, Chen and Hong took over the space, formerly Cafe Asia, they painted the dark walls white and installed a giant cross section of a tree as a communal table. They set up a mini “Asian convenience store” next to the cash register with puffed rice cakes and boxes of Pocky, and brought the line of Boba Guys tea and coffee drinks into the museum. Although the museum wouldn’t allow the chef to install a fermentation room for pickles and condiments — given the centuries-old art on display, there are tight controls on biological materials — Hong started out with a lineup of ambitious lunch dishes. Within a few weeks, though, the crowd, which includes employees from nearby government offices who have long known the public can eat at the cafe without paying admission, let him know they wanted lunch more than they wanted adventure.
Hong’s current menu is both playful and familiar to anyone who eats out in the city: avocado toast with a layer of miso smeared underneath, chicken wings with a sweet fish-sauce-andsesame gloss, marinated pork and pickled vegetables on a puffy “bao”-like bun. Smart food, produced in volume. The dish that made me think Deuki Hong sees us, the diners of his new home, was the fermented jasmine tea leaf salad, frilled lettuces interspersed with shaved radishes and cherry tomatoes and speckled with seeds and tea leaves, repurposed after their first use in making boba drinks. For a few dollars extra, the kitchen added slices of grilled chicken: the quintessential museum cafe lunch.
Hong’s version only hinted at the dense, earthycrunchy versions served at Burmese restaurants like Mandalay or Grocery Cafe. Rather, the chef based his salad on Burma Superstar’s Americanized version — the folks who added lettuce — which he pushed even further away from claims to authenticity. “I respect it too much to copy it,” he says. “I will never make it better than the person who has been making it for 30 years.”
Rather than treating his menu as an extension of the exhibits, it seems, he’s expressing the flavors that he thinks taste good. “I’m Korean by culture but I grew up in America,” he says. “I’m just melding the two. At the end of the day, the only barometer is: Is it delicious?”
Traffic at the cafe is already up 70 percent, says museum staff. Sunday at the Museum still feels like it’s triaging the workable out from the possible, but coowner Chau says plans are in the works for restaurant talks, not to mention a second cafe on the roof, once the museum completes its newest round of expansion.
Where Hong is leaving the practical behind is on Thursday night, when the museum stays open late. Helping coordinate the popup within his own restaurant is Janet Lee, a Saison vet who has joined the fledgling Sunday restaurant group. The beer and wine license was just approved. The carts he plans to roll around the room — shades of dim sum, shades of State Bird — aren’t yet out there.
The evening dishes I tried, though, were personal, more ambitious and flatout delicious: a palm-size rice cracker flecked with black sesame seeds, presented on a giant wooden clip and a bowl of mayo-scallion dip that was hard not to eat by the spoonful; deep-fried ddeok (tubular rice cakes) tossed in a sweet fermentedchile sauce; and fried rice with Chinese sausages, corn and micro-cilantro.
Perhaps representing a museum collection spanning several millennia of art from India, Korea, Japan, China and parts beyond is too big a task for one cafe. Better to let loose one young cook in the city that gave birth to fortune cookies, sisig burritos and Mission Chinese Food and see what he comes up with — not an exhibit so much as a mirror.