A meat pie too good to stay secret

Childhood favorite is the hidden highlight of this Vietnamese bakery in S.F.

I’m writing about this bakery under great duress — not because I don’t think it’s worthy of a mention, but because we food critics are afforded so few culinary treasures that are only for us. In this case, service will prevail over selfishness.

My great secret, my forbidden love, is this bakery in the Sunset District that makes the best rendition of a Vietnamese meat pie I’ve ever had. Spoiler alert: It’s called California Bakery if you don’t want to read all the context below.

The name of the pastry, bánh patê sô, is a loanword version of the now-archaic French term pâté chaud. You can roughly translate that to “hot pastry pie.” It’s usually a mixture of pork and finely chopped onions seasoned with sugar, black pepper and fish sauce baked between layers of flaky puff pastry. Puff pastry is notoriously difficult to wrangle, requiring loads of butter and plenty of chilled resting time. So I can hardly imagine how finicky it must have been for local bakers to handle when French colonizers first brought the recipe to tropical Vietnam during the pre-blast chiller colonial period. Typically, the pies tend to look like an edible recreation of the Hagia Sophia, with the filling in the center forming a dome under the top layer of pastry.

It’s this dish that ignited my lifelong love for savory pastries. On weekends, my mom would defrost a box of Pepperidge Farms puff pastry and whip up a batch of these, folding squares of the floppy dough into triangles and shining up the tops with egg wash. I often woke up smelling the aromas of pork fat and onion, heightened by the juices sizzling as they struck our toaster oven’s heating element. Sometimes the vegetable oil in the pastry would seep out, leaving the pies limper than usual, but that was just part of the experience. It’s a recipe that my mom inherited from her mom, and it’s something I’ve made lots of times on my own, too.

From this grew my cravings for spinach-and-cheese croissants loaded up with bechamel sauce, crispy samosas and jalapeño-studded cornbread. (Unlike Food + Wine editor Janelle Bitker, I am absolutely not a dessert person in my free time, though I appreciate them… intellectually.)

But when I recently stumbled across California Bakery, I had an extraordinary, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave moment with its pastries. The bakery’s display is dominated by doughnuts, cupcakes and crullers, but when I saw the familiar dome, my eyes popped out of my skull like I was a cartoon wolf at a nightclub.

Baked with house-made laminated dough with ample fillings of pork and onion, curried beef and potato, char siu, and spinach and almond, California Bakery’s gorgeously flaky version of the pastry ($3.75) is clearly made the oldfashioned way: with lots of butter and elbow grease. While I’ll be forever grateful to the pies of my youth, tasting the real thing is a sublime experience in its own right.

You can only get bánh patê sô in a small handful of other places in the Bay Area, and none of those others are as well-executed as these. They’re a common sight at the counter at Lee’s Sandwiches, though the quality varies a lot. At San Jose’s Vien Dong, the pies are more affordable at $1.25 each, but not as well-baked or consistent. The ones at California Bakery are really something special.

This mom-and-pop bakery opened shortly before the pandemic hit California — February or March 2020, the cashier told me — and thanks to the chaos of lockdown and its aftermath, few knew it was there for a long time. The gravity of that bad timing really hit me when I read former Food + Wine editor Paolo Lucchesi’s eulogy for another Sunset District business, Hotline, in which he reiterated the words of Russell Moore, former owner of Camino and Kebabery: “If people love a little place that they go to, they should go there a lot right now.”

So you’ll probably see me walking out of California Bakery every week or so, sipping on black coffee and toting a big pink box full of meat pies. I don’t often get the opportunity to go back to a place because of my job, but in this case, it’s well worth the effort.

California Bakery’s gorgeously flaky version of the pastry ($3.75) is clearly

made the old-fashioned way: with lots of butter and

elbow grease

California Bakery. 8 a.m.-5:30 p.m. daily. 719 Taraval St. (and 17th Avenue), San Francisco. 415-864-1385

Soleil Ho / The Chronicle California Bakery’s house-made laminated dough with ample fillings of pork and onion, curried beef and potato, char siu and spinach and almond.