The Hidden Chinatown of San Francisco

New Woey Loy Goey (NLG from now on) is one of three "basement" restaurants left in Chinatown (the other 2 are "Cloud and Spice" ex-Chef Hung's, and Kam Lok). This one is an old restaurant that still has the "bachelor bar" setup on the left as you enter, a lot like New Tin Lung Cafe (reviewed earlier).  Went in for lunch, asked the waitress to recommend a rice plate for lunch. She made an unusual choice: beef stir fried with winter melon, over rice. Winter melon, also known as bitter melon, is often stir-fried with beef and thick gravy so you can serve it over (or next to) rice, but it's an... Adventurous suggestion, something very... Oldskool. I accepted the choice, added a Diet Coke (which they don't have and I accepted the substitute, Coke Zero Sugar).  They served the house soup (low-fuo-tong) which actually came in a generous large bowl, not the normal rice bowl. It has lotus roots, daikon, and carrots, plus peanuts and pork bits. It is qui...

New Fortune is a bit of "hole in the wall" restaurant with a tiny kitchen turning out familiar plates for locals and a few adventurous tourists. There are only a dozen seats as you're sitting almost elbow to elbow with others. Most people order to go here, and just stand near the door to wait. And business is still brisk as they are next to the bus stop, being across the street from Cafe New Honolulu (previously reviewed).  Pretty average restaurant with slightly below average prices, IMHO. I've ordered the standard "beef chow fun" (gone-chow-au-haw) and it's pretty good, but again, not amazing.  3/5

Taqueria Mana is technically not in Chinatown, being on the OTHER side (the Union Square side) of the Stockton tunnel from Chinatown, at 439 Stockton (next to the Boba Guys). However, it is a proper Mexican restaurant, one of the few near Chinatown (which also includes Taqueria Zorro and El Farolito North Beach) Ordered tamales meal and horchata lunch combo to go. Price is over $20, as expected. It's pretty good, but not like amazing good. Tamales feels a little dry, and there's not quite enough salsa to offset that. Still it's pretty flavorful.  3.5/5

Right on the corner of Ross Alley and Washington, San Sun Restaurant is basically a "tea restaurant" that caters to everybody with a HUGE menu. However, it does have a few offering that are rather unique in Chinatown that could make it worth a visit.   I went in for lunch and was one of the few early birds (it's right at noon) and asked the waitress what she'd recommend. She said "Satay Beef Rice Noodles (with Chinese Brocolli), but it's spicy." I am not exactly a heat-eater, and my tolerance is pretty much Shin Ramen, but I'm willing to give it a try, so I said "make it medium spicy?"   After a few minutes, I got a plate that's almost uniformly dark. The beef is dark, the gai-lan (Chinese brocolli) was a dark leafy veg, and the rice noodle was darkened with soy sauce. So it's a dark mass (mess?). While the taste isn't bad, and the spice level is fine, Chines Brocolli is slightly bitter, and doesn't fit with the other tastes...

Food Express, nestled between The Wok Shop and Snow Garden Restaurant on the 700 block of Grant in Chinatown, serves cafeteria style to-go food. However, I would recommend you skip this place.  I tried it one afternoon, hoping to find some fast food to go as I was in a hurry and I don't want a sit-down meal.  I went in, tried to order, was told they are out of rice, please give her a few minutes while she go get some. And indeed, a few minutes later she's back with some rice. Unfortunately, the rice is pretty much room temp by the time I get to consume it.  I tried picking out a few entrees on the cafeteria style steel basins, but these are even worse than Panda Express items. At least those are relatively fresh and plentiful. Here, they look like leftover scraps that's been kept lukewarm by the hot water bath under the basin for too long. Beef and broccoli turned into almost unchewable mess. Veggies have lost their texture. Rice is clumpy. Even reheating in microwave did...

Snow Garden Restaurant is a thoroughly average restaurant in the middle of Chinatown. Being on the famous Grant Ave, it is where tourists walk by by the hundreds daily, yet its service is slow, selection limited, and quality merely average. It is not even open for dinner, being a strictly lunch restaurant.  I visited on a weekday for lunch. Other than entrees and "XXX over rice" lunch plates, the only thing they seem to offer is fried rice and fried noodles (chow fan and chow mien). They don't even offer rice noodles, as I typically order "beef and fried rice noodles" or gone-chow-au-ho as a test.  I ended up ordering beef chow mien. And the orders took 10-15 minutes to arrive, which is forever in Chinatown, where entrees are typically par-cooked separately then when ready to service, ingredients are combined then wok-fried to finish cooking and serve. There is also this soy-sauce-y liquid at the bottom of the plate after I finished most of the noodles.     Pric...

Utopia Cafe was an old restaurant in Chinatown... Only by name. It's been sold multiple times but kept the English name. It's current incarnation goes by the Chinese name 牛麵王 King of Beef Noodles.  I ordered their standard beef stew and egg  noodle soup,but they have a lot of variations in noodle, protein, and combinations thereof. With or without soup, with or without wonton, with egg noodles or rice noodles, beef stew over rice... etc. etc.  The prices are below average at between 10 to 12 bucks, but it reflects the reduced portion size. I checked the prices as it had risen 25% just in the past 2 years, according old menus via Google search. Still, the portion size is decent.  All in all, I'd give this place 4 out of 5 for good but not great price for quality and quantity of food. I may go back to try some of their other stuff.  Trivia: the entire Waverly Pl including a previous incarnation of this restaurant appeared in a Jet Li video game. 

You're probably wondering... what's a pizza restaurant doing in SF Chinatown reviews? This one is just on the border... Just south of Kearny St.  Outta Sight Pizza is pretty famous for their Larkin St. location, and when they opened a second location to tap into the lunch crowd in the Financial District, and it's only half a block from southern edge of Chinatown, I decided to give it a go. TL;DR -- expensive, but the pizza's indeed delicious, and LOTS of vegan choices. Extremely thin and tasty crust, toppings that you taste without being overwhelmed by tons of pizza sauce.  Being the first time there, I asked what they recommend, they recommended 2 vegan entries. I asked them to recommend one meat (Sausage / Mushroom / Onion), and one vegan (MSG). Plus a can of Diet Coke. With 15% tip, I walked out $19.47 lighter. That's two SLICES of pizza (decent sized). A bit expensive, IMHO.  I'm glad to try it, but I wouldn't eat this every day, or I'd limit myself...

I am sure you have seen this font before, on Chinese takeout boxes, in Chinatowns, on Chinese restaurant signs or menus, or something that was supposed to be "Asian". It goes by a variety of names, such as Wonton, Chop Suey, Kung-fu, and so on.   But did you ever wonder HOW this font came to be? And how did it become the face of Chinatown?  The first appearance of this font family was registered in 1883 by Henry H Thorp of the Cleveland Type Foundry as "Chinese", though later it was changed to " Mandarin ". However, it is unknown if he personally designed it, as there are many design patents filed in his name even when he was unlikely to be directly involved.  This type of font was known in typography as an "ethnic font", trying to evoke a particular culture or ethnic group, and there are hundreds of them. Some are actually based somewhat on the language's original writing, like those pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Cyrillic fonts, then there are thes...

Golden Star Vietnamese Restaurant has been at its location, next to Portsmouth Square (11 Walter U Lum Place, roughly Clay and Walter Lum Place, between Grant and Kearny) for a long time. And they have always delivered consistent quality pho with proper broth.  One item that I recommend there, if you eat beef, is NOT the "Number One", but rather, their beef stew pho, which is number 24 (if I remember correctly). The beef has been stewed for a long time, with proper amount of tendons and pretty much falls apart as you poke it with your chopstick, and almost melts in your mouth. The broth is VERY flavorful, and obviously very different from your normal pho broth.  Even with a can of soda, it's well under $20. when I don't want roast pork, I'd go here.  You can definitely try the Number One, but every pho place has the number one, and there is almost no difference among them anymore, other than the broth.  The main problem with this place is they are only open from 1...

A new "tea restaurant" (even though it didn't call itself that) has opened at 881 Clay St, intersection of Stockton and Clay. It is called G&Y Bakery Cafe.  They used a hard laminated menu with both sides crammed full of items, both Eastern and Western style breakfast so it's clearly a tea restaurant. Tables are quite clean as it is new. However, a sampling of their dish left the writer a bit wanting.  Went in in the afternoon for a late lunch, and ordered something pretty simple: beef stew with seasonal vegetables over rice. The item arrived promptly, with plenty of gravy to soak in the rice. And the stuff is pretty flavorful. The vegetables, basically choy sum, is fine. However, the same can't be said of the beef. The beef is tough to the point of almost inedible. There are a lot of tripe and tendons, and they didn't seem to have been cooked long enough to soften properly. Took me a bit to chew each bit before they can be swallowed.  The price is a bit o...

House of Dimsum is easy to recognize on Jackson between Stockton and Grant, with its blue canopies covering their little "parklet" holding a couple tables and chairs.   House of Dimsum is a casual restaurant where you order at the counter, and get the stuff immediately (unless its a special item, which may take a little longer), and seat yourself, and they offer a lot of fresh dimsum, both sweet and savory, for reasonable prices. House of Dimsum is also a bit unusual in that they will sell you individual pieces instead of sets of 3 or 4 so you can try everything. Most places that sell dimsum will only sell you whole sets. They often have a line outside, as they move a LOT of dimsum daily and everything is fresh.  They also have more than just dimsum. They can also get you steamed rice with pork ribs, wonton noodle soup, soy milk, boba tea, rice noodle rolls, and so on.  You can just point and order, or you can try ordering off the menu. The menu's way too long to list her...

New Lun Ting Cafe is not a restaurant that stands out, and even in Chinatown it's extremely old-fashioned... It has maroon Naugahyde booth seats and bachelor's row stools, and it serves a mix of Eastern and Western foods, so it could be considered a tea restaurant.  According to history, the bachelor's row used to stretch all the way around the interior in a U-shape and the whole cafe was called "bachelor's cafe", and women used to avoid the place. By adding booths and tables back in the 1970's, the place was made more "family-friendly".  Another nickname for the place was "The Porkchop House", even though its best-known dish was actually "roast pork". A huge slab of pork, with ribs still attached in some places, sliced to about half-inch sticks, almost perfect tenderness, slathered with either "brown sauce" (which is sort of burnt orange), or if you are adventurous, try the yellow / curry sauce. You also get some ve...

Sam Wo, at 713 Clay St, is the oldest restaurant in Chinatown, tracing itself back to 1908, just after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Founded by 3 siblings from Taishan province of China (adjacent to Guangzhou), the restaurant is still open today, having barely survived COVID . The name literally means three peace, referring to the 3 siblings, and may they ever work together peacefully.  Sam Wo, having survived this long, is considered an institution of Chinatown , with many people enjoying its authenticity and a bit of dingy ambiance. Plenty of famous people ate at Sam Wo: Allen Ginsberg , Herb Caen , and even Conan O'Brien , but its low prices and very late hours (open till 3AM back in the 2010's) also means it sees plenty of regulars, locals, and late-nighters.  Sam Wo is also famous for having the " world's rudest waiter " by the name of Edsel Ford Fung, who had a house rule: "No Booze, No B.S., No Jive, No Coffee, Milk, Soft Drinks, Fortune Cookies....

Chop suey is reputed to have been invented in Chinatown. The story goes that in the 1850's, Chinatown is barely established, but word was already out that Chinese food is cheap and delicious. So, late at night, 2 miners fresh off the gold fields, wandered into this Chinese restaurant, even as the owner and cook is about to close up. Already half drunk, they want food, and they want it now! To avoid confrontation, the cook went into the kitchen, found whatever scraps of vegetables left, tossed them all into the wok, whipped up some sauce, added whatever scraps of meat he had, added an egg, and served it on a plate and gave it to the miners.  The miners loved it, to the surprise of the owner, as they wanted the name of the dish as they want to order it again when they come back.  The owner, flabbergasted, simply told them 雜碎 tzap-suey which literally means "mixed scraps". The miners heard that as "chop suey", and a legend was born.  Keep in mind this is a story, a...

San Francisco's Chinatown contains a number of firsts. I've previously mentioned the first Taoist Temple, the Tin How Temple on Waverly St. Here is another one: the first dimsum restaurant in the US... Hang Ah Tea House  (1 Pagoda Pl, SF, CA 94108), circa 1920.  Hidden in an alley called Pagoda Place next to the Willy Woo-Woo Playground, Hang Ah is away from the normal bustle and hustle of Chinatown centered on Grant Avenue. It is near the Stockton Tunnel leading out of Chinatown to Union Square, between Clay and Sacramento. Most tourists only stumble upon this place by accident, unless they sought it out.  The first sign you see is actually written in chalk: Hang Ah's chalk sign The restaurant itself is a bit larger on the inside than the entrance suggested. Go in, make a left turn, down a slight slope (probably for ADA) and enter into the dining area, where you will see about a dozen or so tables. You can order entrees or dimsum.  Entrees are nicely prepared, and ...