Gary Soup

The elusive "smokey" flavor could also come from a drizzle of dark sesame oil, which to my taste buds imparts a slightly "burnt" taste.

It's cheap for a restaurant that can boast of having had an ex-President's patronage and attracts an expense-account and name-dropper crowd, but it ain't cheap for Vietnamese (or any ethnic Asian cuisine) and it ain't worth it. But it's got a great thing going as THE "safe" Asian destination restaurant, and as long as they don't screw up the well-prepared, inoffensive food and maintain the high level of service (which is good, warm and welcoming), Charles Phan can cry all the way to the bank. Wait until SD moves into its new digs in the Ferry Building (talk about location!) and you'll see a real cash cow. You've got to hand it to the boy from Mission High!

Dollars to donuts says it was hami gua.

China was very paranoid about the possibility of a nuclear attack by the US in the 50's. The "white line" delineated the area assumed to be beyond the range of U.S. missiles. China packed up whole factories and their personnel (many from the Shanghai region) and moved them to Sichuan.

The Panama Canal was built around the turn of the century. The first big wave of Chinese immigrants came to work in the California gold mines, and later on the transcontinental railroad (both well bfore the construction of the Panama Canal). Many of the Chinese in the Caribbean were imported direcly from China to work in sugar cane fields. (I guess that makes this post food-related.)

Chongqing-Chengdu has been an important industrial center since much of China's heavy industry was moved behind the "white line" in the 50's and has become a population giant (30,000,00 people, almost the population of California, in Chongqing "Municipality" alone). My theory is that bestowing Municipality status is a way of keeping the region on a short leash. Chongqing will report directly to Beijing, and the highest political offices will be staffed by ambitious cadres with a demonstrated loyalty to the Party and the Central government, thereby reducing the opportunity for provincial hanky-panky or worse. A little off the topic of food, though...

when did this happen? last i heard, there were only 3: tianjin, beijing and shanghai. A couple of years ago, Herbacidal. Here's the latest roster: China's Administrative Units

Well, they've both been there long enough, though I recall when Malvina's was just a bakery (famous for for its Cialde) and later a coffee roaster (good, but not Graffeo). It wasn't a coffee house in my beatnik/existentialist days. Mario's is a treasure, but as a coffee house it has a claustrophobic feel to it (not enough room for a lot of people to spread out their Sunday Times like the slow readers always did at Caffee Trieste).

As a Berkeleyan in the 60's and a Cal grad, I weep for Berkeley.

Close, it's Bow Hon It's one of the most under-appreciated Chinese restaurants in San Francisco because of its location. Foodies operate under the assumption that nothing on Grant Avenue, like Fisherman's Wharf, is worthy of their attention because its so touristy. It's also a little too real to be in the tourists' radar. Fortunately there are enough local Chinese (and a few un-bounded gweilo food-lovers) to keep it going.

I know what Eddie is referring to, it was probably the tastiest choice in school cafeteria lunch lines. Always served on canned crispy fried noodles, probably the Chung King label. In retrospect, I find this ironic, as "Chung King", known as the wartime capital of China, is the largest city in Sichuan province (or was, since it's now an independent municipality). The blandness of the canned noodle based chow mein was about as far from Sichuan cuisine as could be imagined. I can't say I miss the American chow mein of yore, but I do admit to an occasional craving for Tomato Beef Chow Mein, a one-time staple of Chinese-American restaurants in San Francisco. At least it was made with stir-fried noodles, thinly sliced beef flank and fresh tomato chunks. I always thought of it as "Chinese spaghetti". All this notwithstanding, chow mein (chao mian) is an authentic Chinese food, with a solid place at the table, though it's not exactly fine dining.

That was Shanghai. Grace Zia Chu, in The Pleasure of Chinese Cooking, reported seeing a neon sign in Shanghai just after WWII that read "Genuine American Chop Suey Served Here." It probably made sense, because there were a lot of US Service personnel stationed their after the Japanese Army fled.

Oy! Some vignettes: 1) April, 1992, Shanghai: My sly hostess took me to Nanxiang Xiaolong Mantou Dian for breakfast. My first meal on Chinese soil, and my xiaolong bao epiphany. I fell in love with xiaolong bao and Shanghai. My hostess is now my sister-in-law. 2) Same time period, snacking one evening at the Longhua Temple street fair. Resolving not to be culture-bound, I enjoyed sparrow-on-a-stick and snake soup, along with local-style jiaozi and other more prosaic treats. 3) Several dinners at our erstwhile favorite for traditional Shanghai fare, Yue You Restaurant on Fengyang Lu in Shanghai. Most notable was a plenary family gathering ca. 1995 where we had a celebratory banquet for 10 people consisting of about 20 courses (with plenty of Reeb Gold beer for the men) for less than $100 US. Yue You was located in a stunning three-story art-deco mansion haunted by the ghosts of Shaoxing Opera characters. The building is now the home of a v. spendy Japonais place called Ambrosia, where the price of our banquet wouldn't cover a light dinner for two. 4) Breakfasts at an impromptu hawker center which springs up every morning in a vacant lot near our apartment complex in Jinqiao. Fiery doufu hua, best I have ever found, accompanied by sinfully greasy and delicious shengjian bao and fat, savory congyou bing. 5) (Back in the USA) Somewhere in suburban New Jersey. On a trip to New York, we visited an old Shanghai neighbor of my wife's, who had emigrated to the US and opened a small Asian market in a mini-mall near Parsippany. He had a house guest, an ex-Chef for the Chinese Consulate (Embassy?) in NYC, whose two-year rotation had ended and was lying low, seeking asylum. In our honor, he whipped up a feast the like we had never seen, including a great braised eel dish (which my wife had maintained was impossible with the frozen Shanghai river eel available in the US.) 6) I can't avoid the sentimentality of including my wife's own cooking, which rises to considerable heights when she feels the occasion warrants it. Here, without comment, is part of the the meal she prepared for my 60th birthday:

You must go at odd hours. I haven't been able to get a table there in about 35 years. Now I'm a Puccini weenie like Squeat Mungry. It kind of galls me to go to a place that hasn't been there since before I was born, and to drink coffee made by a machine that weighs less than I do, but I guess that's progress.

I agree with that entirely. My wife's Shanghainese home cooking repertoire includes a sweet-and-sour pork dish that's a variant on red-cooked pork, but with the addition of Zhenjiang vinegar and rock sugar. She also sometimes does a sweet-and-sour fish dish that's not quite as elaborate as Songshu fish (though she'd be loathe to treat a really fresh fish that way). I was trying to lampoon the self-caricature that the sweet-and-sour style has become. In my salad days I once went a wretched (but very cheap) Chinese-American restaurant on Polk Street in SF and watched as the cook prepared sweet-and-sour pork with the flourish of dumping in a whole small can of fruit cocktail. I don't thing strawberry pork is something I would order in any cuisine. Now if you want to talk about raspberry chipotle glazed ribs....

Thanks for the gloss and the wonderful link. I too, am very interested in Chinese "dialects" (a language is a dialect with an army, as someone once said, which is why we speak of Romance "languages" but Chinese "dialects). Out of curiosity, how do you feel about the frequent characterization of Chaozhou (Ooops!) cuisine as a "branch" of Cantonese cuisine?

Strawberry pork, lemon chicken, orange shrimps.... Here's a page from the menu booklet for Xinya (Sun Ya) restaurant in Shanghai, 1935. It was a mammoth place frequented by Westerners, compradores, and well-heeled local enterpeneurs alike. It's still there, but surviving mostly through franchising fast food dim sum. Check out the footnote at the bottom of the page for item #100, "Sweet and Sour Pork".

And demand to generate the competition. Ben, I was riffing a bit on your discourse for the sake of making a little noise in this heretofore sleepy forum. I recognized off the bat that you avoided the word "Chefs" in favor of "cooks" (who are the real coin of the realm). But I felt like jousting with your statement about hiring "the best cooks from Kong Kong, Shanghai, and Taiwan" being a big factor in the improvement of Chinese cuisine in TO and Van. After all, if you were to hire the "best cooks from Hong Kong", that would diminish HK's culinary standing, which I haven't seen noted. As for the "best cooks from Shanghai", from the onset of the Cultural Revolution until the flush times of the '90's, they were keeping a low profile and probably favoring only their families and friends with their efforts. How to recruit them?

I think Jo-mel has a good point, which I would take further. Not only the end of the Exclusion Act, but the gradual uplifting of the economic status of Chinese in the US (following upon the establishments of viable family units) had plenty of impact on the quality of Chinese food in restaurants. San Francisco, for example always had a self-contained Chinese community with an industrial base, and there were always restaurants preparing Chinese food for Chinese, albeit worker's fare. As the Chinese rose in economic status, and began to dine out more, the market was prepped for better fare. Due respects to Ben Hong, but I don't think the "star stystem" applies to Chinese cuisine. (Parenthentically, I think it's mostly illusory in Western cuisines as well.) It doesn't take hiring "the best cooks out of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Shanghai" to bring the quality of the food up to rising expectations.

really? that's interesting. i didn't know that. Are you referring to Toronto and San Francisco proper, or their metro areas? I would have expected San Francisco metro area's Chinese population to be predominantly Chinese educated professionals and their families, in significantly higher numbers than in areas such as Philadelphia, with Chinese from rural China and poorer Guangdong to be in SF Chinatown. San Francisco proper. Silicon Valley has a higher proportion of Chinese tech professional immigrants, and also a wider variety of regional Chinese cusines. San Francisco certainly has highly educated Chinese, but most became so here in the US, and cuisine-wise tend to stay close to their roots. My familiarity with Toronto is limited, but I am aware that it has an old (mainland Cantonese) population contingent in the central area, as well as the recent HK immigration contingent in both the Dundas/Spadino area and the burbs of Markham and Richmond Hill (and three or four other "Chinatowns.") The difference is in numbers. In SF the Taishanese are the majority force, whereas (I'm guessing) in TO it's the HK immigrants.

Haw flakes have been used to feed pre-digital parking meters here in SF. If you turn the crank carefully, they will work as quarters. If they break, they will jam the meter (also effective, as long as you are not caught in the act).

There may be some bias there, as Toronto's Chinese tend to be urban middle-class Hong Kongers who migrated within the past 15 years or so. In San Francisco, by contrast, the Chinese are predominantly from rural Guangdong. The two groups may bring different culinary sensibilities to the kitchen.

We don't know enough about the various Chinese to even have regional biases, yet we're qualified to judge? It seems to me that in order to vet something you have to have some experiential basis. You may have eaten at only Cantonese restaurants (however excellent) in the past and walked into a Shanghainese restaurant, and felt that it was all "wrong" in the balance of ingredients and the preparation.

What on earth is Mr. Allegruci talking about? What does "equivalency" mean? All Napas are equal, but some are more equal that others?

That's a rather broad question, like asking "where's the best Parisian food in Paris?" Are you interested in "high" cuisine, or more popular forms like traditional street foods? Some good "old-line" places are Lao Banzhai, Lao Zhenxing and Wangbaohe (for crab). Let us know what you are thinking of, maybe we can get a thread going here.