13 hours ago, ProfessionalHobbit said:B and I went to Sam Wo, a so-called San Francisco institution whose claims to fame were one extremely rude waiter and crowd-pleasing food.
The restaurant closed a few years ago after having failed a DOH inspection and then reopened last year at a new location.
Hong Kong-style iced milk tea
Duck jook. Was as average as you could imagine a bowl of porridge to be.
Mongolian beef. It was as unexciting as it looks.
Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce. The stems were tough but the leaves were not. I'm learning to distrust any review written by Michael Bauer (restaurant critic of the SF Chronicle).
Salt-and-pepper chicken wings.
This was billed as a "must-get" item, and while I don't know about that, it was easily the best thing we ate last night.
And now that we've been to Sam Wo, we don't ever have to go back again. I suppose I could have posted this in the California subforum, but I thought I'd spare y'all the disservice of an entry.
Sam Wo
713 Clay Street (Kearny Street)
Chinatown
San Francisco
I took a look at the dinner menu (and also the lunch menu) of this place. I don't know the past or present reputation of this place, but just from the menu I would hesitate to order something like Mongolian Beef from what seems to be a Cantonese place that seems to specialize in Noodle dishes and rice-combination dishes. The tough kai-lan was a bummer and they should have done better, yes. The duck congee? Maybe that wasn't what they excelled at in their repertoire of congees? It's not something that is very often eaten for dinner in (again) a Cantonese restaurant, anyway... for lunch or breakfast, more likely** - maybe they served the dregs of it augmented with fresh (under-prepared) congee? But also, Cantonese taste profiles are much more muted than, say, Szechuanese or Hunanese - is that a factor? Just wondering.
Many Chinese restaurants have a certain "skew" towards some dishes being excellent - due to the particular abilities and proclivities of the chefs, whether or not it is a famed restaurant or a hole-in-the-wall place. Many menu items are there because of "expectations" but they may not be what the chef is good at. Yes, even at the best places.
But when all is said and done, maybe this place is simply no longer what it was before if it was good to start with. Yes, true, some would also say that if something is on one's menu it should be excellent, otherwise why put it there? But that argument is more relevant to high-end Western cuisine restaurants. Lower-end ones would have that familiar panoply of all sorts of things, while many Chinese restaurants fall into the trap of what I referred to above.
** Even if I myself, personally, would eat congee for the night-time meal if I felt like it. :-)
