Foraging for a take-home feast in San Francisco’s Chinatown
Foraging for a take-home feast in Chinatown
By Leslie Harlib IJ-Marin
At 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday, Chinatown’s arteries - Stockton Street and Grant Avenue - and its veins - Vallejo, Jackson and Washington - are empty of people and nearly devoid of traffic.
A late-summer breeze chilled with fog swirls dirt in the gutters. The curved swallow-tail Chinese roofs and dragon-emblazoned signs on many buildings stand out in exotic relief, a pleasure to look at without the distraction of hordes of people who will pack these streets later on in the day.
It’s a marvelous time to set out on a shopping expedition. No crowds. There’s metered parking everywhere. I opt for a spot in the North Beach Garage (735 Vallejo) where all the spaces have little homilies painted on them, not just numbers, and two hours will cost me all of $5 without fear of a parking ticket.
I am here to forage the fixings for a dinner party for six from the myriad of Chinese delis, takeout restaurants and dim sum shops that make this part of San Francisco an epicenter for unusual, inexpensive prepared food finds. I don’t expect to cook a thing. All I plan to do is hunt and gather, then lay the goodies out later, just before my guests arrive.
Going to Chinatown to find great takeout is an adventure. I even have a guide: Shirley Fong-Torres. She’s known as the Wok Wiz of San Francisco for her 24 years of leading walking tours of Chinatown and building a company around this service. Her new book, “The Woman Who Ate Chinatown: A San Francisco Odyssey” (IUniverse Publishing) came out in July. It’s packed with suggestions on where to eat as well as buy deli-style Chinese food, so we use it as a guide.
With firecracker energy and a smile that seems to wrap around her face, she strides through Chinatown so briskly that I almost have to trot to keep up with her because she’s off to Marin for a party following our spree.
My menu will be determined by what catches my eye. Unlike shopping for ingredients bought to follow recipes, this forage is fueled by pure impulse. If it looks, smells or tastes good, I’ll buy some.
I nix the dried deer tendons ($16 a pound) stacked like kind- ling in a carton at Hing Fung Trading on Vallejo, just two doors down from the garage. Part grocery and part herbalist, Hing Fung is a bazaar of the bizarre for Caucasian palates. Beyond deer tendon, there are jars of dried scallops in different sizes from all over Asia. Dried sea cucumbers, looking like fossilized pestles, are only $138 a pound. Swallow’s nests for birds’ nest soup -a great delicacy - are available, dried, for well over $200 a pound.
After a taste, I buy a bag of sweet and sour pickled plums. They’re the green of Italian olives, the size of shooter marbles and have a piquantly deep fruity finish ($4.50 a pound). I plan to put them in vodka mixed with bottled lychee juice and a couple of fresh peeled lychees to make Asian-fusion martinis.
Fong-Torres keeps up a running commentary as we shoot up this street and down that.
“If you want to get what you need faster, you have to shout. People here do a lot of yelling,” she grinned as we popped into Imperial Palace Restaurant at 818 Washington St. It’s 9:30 a.m. and cold, so we order cups of restorative jook, a soothing, savory porridge of chicken broth and disintegrated rice laced with fresh green scallions and chunks of deep-fried wonton skin. It’s a classic Chinese breakfast. Jook leads to deep-fried salty Chinese doughnuts that look like churros but are as crunchy as tortilla chips. They are perfect to balance the mild jook.
We sample fluffy white pork buns, steamed and stuffed with a candylike jellied pork filling; har gow, the classic shrimp dim sum wrapped in rice noodle dough. All these types of dim sum can be brought home and re-steamed quickly in the microwave with a little water in a dish and a paper towel cover. Each variety is no more than $4 or $5 and comes with three or four pieces each. Buy several kinds and serve these as starters. If you want to live daringly, fresh frog is on the menu here in a number of variations at $13.85 for a generous portion. Eating it will be a ribeting experience.
More dim sum, including baked pork buns a good six-inches around, are inexpensive at You’s Dim Sum, at 675 Broadway. Here are also deep-fried taro balls stuffed with minced pork, thick steamed rice noodles fried on one side like potstickers and packed with pungent chard and scallions, steamed lotus leaves filled with sticky rice stuffed with minced pork, Chinese sausage and bits of hard-boiled egg yolk. They all make fine hors d’oeuvres.
I plan to serve a variety of main dishes, too. For one of these I buy roast pig by the pound at New King Tin Restaurant, 826 Washington. The counter-man hacks off chunks from a whole animal still warm from the oven. The skin is a celebration of salted crackle. The meat is so tender, it’s like velvet. I can’t stop nibbling at it.
Yee’s Restaurant, at 1131 Grant Ave. (and which opens at 8 a.m.) yields all types of bounty. Whole roast duck (Fong-Torres says it’s her favorite place for duck), a half pound of spare ribs, a half pound of Chinese red-roasted sweet-glazed pork, deep-fried chicken legs, a carton of chow fun fat noodles stir-fried with bean sprouts, a mixed-vegetable combination where crunchy, lacy rounds of lotus root are the centerpiece, all sets me back a mere $20. I’m weighted down with what feels like six pounds of food already and we’re not done shopping.
Fong-Torres introduces me to the huge collection of fresh teas at the family-owned Red Blossom Tea Shop, 831 Grant Ave. It opens at 10 a.m. If you have the time, sit down for a free tasting. You can also buy classic and beautifully austere Chinese tea sets, with tray, tea pot, six little cups and other tea accoutrements for $60 on up.
Decorations are part of my dinner party plan. Fong-Torres steers us to the Merchant of China Inc., 930 Grant Ave., where I buy silk sacks to cover wine bottles and that look like little Mandarin costumes for $1.99 each. You’ll find everything from chopsticks to tablecloths, napkins, Chinese clothing and all sorts of fun things to put on your table. Up and down Grant, I gather small fans, tiny statues of dragons, monkeys and other Chinese tchochkes - nothing more than $1 - to place at each guest’s seat for take-home souvenirs of the evening.
I harvest dessert - plump rice-flour pancakes stuffed with red bean paste and egg custard, steamed sponge cake, custard tarts in lard-based puff pastry, deep-fried rice flour balls packed with pureed red beans and covered in toasted sesame seeds, mango tarts - from V.I.P. Coffee & Cakes Shop, 671 Broadway. It’s almost a museum of Chinese and Western-style pastries.
I’m heading home by 10:30 a.m., just when Chinatown is getting crowded enough to mean lines for service in groceries and restaurants and the parking garages are full. I’ve spent all of $60 to collect a huge three-course dinner for six, including table decorations and tea.
Even with gas and toll, I consider the day my good fortune.
IF YOU HARVEST
– Wok Wiz three-hour guided tours of Chinatown are available daily, offered with ($45) or without ($35) lunch. For details, call 650-355-9657 or go to www.wokwiz.com
– Do it yourself by following the information in “The Woman Who Ate Chinatown: A San Francisco Odyssey,” $17.95 from www.iuniverse.com.