Chandavkl's Blog: Everything We Ate In San Francisco

Though it was just a three day trip, we managed to cover a lot of ground in last month's visit to San Francisco. Due to traffic conditions, we didn't get to the Royal Pacific Motor Inn until 8:30pm, at which point I was only looking for a light snack, and not knowing what restaurants were still open. I had been keeping track of Chinese restaurant openings in Chinatown since last year, and there were two on Jackson St., Fusion Dumplings and Taishan Restaurant, both of which were still open, so I chose Fusion Dumplings which was the first. This was their sidewalk spotlight.

The Peking duck dumplings were quite good.

The intriguing sounding Shanghai bean curd leaf rolls was just a fancy name for vegetarian chicken.

With an early Tuesday lunch scheduled, Tuesday morning was limited to a visit to the newly opened Stockton Bakery for an excellent BBQ pork bun and this unusual and delicious durian bun.

For lunch it was on to the newish Grand Dynasty in San Jose. Interestingly I recently received an inquiry to be an expert witness in defending an unnamed Chinese restaurant in this area from claims of appropriation of trade secrets leveled by the owner of another restaurant against his former associates who opened a similar restaurant. The premise was that the design and menus of the two restaurants were similar. I declined the offer, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Grand Dynasty being sued by the owner of the shuttered Dynasty, a mile away in Cupertino. If the plaintiff were arguing there was something proprietary about the look and feel of Grand Dynasty, I would say sorry, Charlie, this is what all the new large Cantonese restaurants in the Bay Area look like.

I'm a sucker for piggy buns, so here are the Grand Dynasty lava buns.

These green fried mochi dumplings were great.

Fish dumplings with roe was another interesting and different dish.

At sit down dim sum restaurants, the cheung fun always have filling. This is the first time I've seen plain cheung fun with dipping sauce at a large restaurant like Grand Dynasty.

Apparent, a combination of crunchy tofu, eggplant and shrimp paste is a common dish in Hong Kong, but I only ate it for the first time as an entree, six months ago in Monterey Park. So it was interesting to see this dish again, as a dim sum item.

The crispy skin pork belly was top notch.

We almost never order BBQ pork pastries, because we normally order baked or steamed BBQ pork buns, and these would be duplicative. This version was quite good too.

There was one other Chinese restaurant in the same shopping center on Bollinger Road, Shang Cafe. This is their mung bean noodle salad.

Afterwards we checked out a couple of shopping centers in nearby Cupertino. We immediately saw evidence that all the big new Cantonese restaurants look alike, such as these views inside Koi Palace Contempo in the Cupertino Main Street shopping center.

The cheapest thing on the menu at Koi Palace Contempo was this $7 steamed bbq pork bun. I don't think I've ever paid that much for an order of these. The guava cheese pastry at the nearby 85° Bakery and Cafe was better and much cheaper.

It was back to Chinatown for dinner, at the newly opened Taishan Restaurant on Jackson St. We had eaten at their first location on Broadway two years ago, Taishan Cuisine. Anyway, as we walk into the restaurant and look at the menu, we see a combination of familiar dishes and dishes we never heard of, which presumably represent modern day dishes of Taishan. The real puzzle to me was the fact that the prices of just about everything was quite high, something not to be expected given the peasant background of people from Taishan. We ordered the beef chow fun and the grass carp jook, each apparently pricey at $18 each.

To our surprise, both dishes were unlike any version of these we ever had before. The chow fun noodles were not the flat noodles we’re familiar with, but rather sort of crinkly, reminiscent of the new style crinkly cheung fun some of the restaurants serve these days. When I asked the waitress whether the noodles were made in house, she said they were. Since the crinkly cheung fun is the new style that has become popular in Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the last few years, I presume the same trend has affected Taishan. And then there was the fish jook. When I bit into the fish, I thought it was squid–hard and crunchy, but it looked like fish. So we asked the waitress, and she said it was a special kind of imported fish, grass carp, which is used traditionally to create a crunchy fish jook in southern China. I must say that the portions were also quite large, so the prices which seemed unreasonable actually reflected the portion size, the utilization of rare ingredients, and based on other Yelp reviews from people in-the-know, high quality authentic Taishan cuisine.

Wednesday was spent entirely in the City. Crispy baked BBQ pork buns from AA Bakery on Stockton St. provided a nice start to the day.

At lunchtime we headed over to the newly opened second branch of Hon’s Wun Tun House, a branch of the Vancouver restaurant of the same name but nowhere as good. The San Francisco branch opened up maybe 30 years ago and I’ve only eaten there once as it was unremarkable. However they just set up this new location on Washington St., taking the space of the iconic Washington Bakery and Café. This new branch is much larger, with a much bigger menu. The fish ball soup with dumplings was pretty good. The pickled green bean soup was surprising as we were expecting regular Cantonese egg noodles, but instead getting lai fun rice noodles.

We headed downtown to say goodbye to three of our favorite stores that were closing. Everything they say about downtown San Francisco is true. When I walked into Off Saks 5th Avenue on Market Street, the security guard was wrestling a shoplifter to the ground, so I quickly fled downstairs into the basement. Dinner was in Chinatown was at G & Y Bakery and Café, where we ate last year, and which doesn’t have any bakery goods for sale. I guess that’s why this year they added a secondary sign which said G & Y Hong Kong style café. We had the fish with corn sauce, which was actually more of a corn soup, and bitter melon with beef.

Getaway day before lunch on the way home via Milpitas was this tuna bread from Little Swan on Stockton St. in Chinatown, one of a small number of non-chain enterprises ever to have locations in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

At HL Peninsula in Milpitas we have further proof that all new Hong Kong style seafood and dim sum palaces look alike.

What an exciting array of new and attractive dim sum items. My favorite was the purple wild rice shrimp paste cruller cheung fun--quite a mouthful in two ways.

Something I've never seen is the ginger sweet rice cakes, which apparently is typically a seasonal new year's dish.

Continuing purple treats, the unique baked taro bun.

The lava bun, however, was a disappointment, since it was pictured and described on the menu as a tangerine bun, not a squid ink bun. Taste was fine, though.