NOT A YOUNG WHITE AMBIANCE

The food is okay. Not spectacular, but honest and decent. Still, it could've been better. With far less onion. It's just a personal thing, but I tend to avoid onion. What I ended up having was black been sauce spareribs and rice (豉汁排骨飯 'si jap pai gwat faan'), what I really wanted was the fish fragrance eggplant (魚香茄子飯 'yü heung ke ji faan'). They were out of eggplant.
Common Canto cooking, twixt restaurant and home style.
Good stuff, either way.

It's not the best restaurant in the world, just a decent eatery operated by a hard-working family, offering honest food, a good value for the money, cooked to the taste of a home town audience. If your home town was somewhere in Toishan county.

I have never been to Toishan, but I could probably locate it on a map.
It's not the home town of any of my kinfolk. But many San Franciscans ancestrally hail from there and neighboring districts, hence its importance as background in our universe. It's warmer there than here, by about ten to twenty degrees, and even in the cold season the pavement's frigidity does not cripple you like it does here. Yes, some of my acquaintances often say that they like the bitter cold and rain of winter -- which they have stressed repeatedly in the last six weeks whenever I bellyached -- but they are demented, masochistic, and have a mean streak as wide as the Milky Way. They should shut the heck up, and kindly get stuffed. Offensive cretins.

I do not think I ever want to visit New York, or anywhere on the East Coast, between the end of October and, let us say, May. Everything I've heard tells me it is an unbelievably horrible place for six months of the year.
For your information, Chicago is also East Coast.
Everything dammit east of Denver.

Guns, nuts, bad pizza, and weird accents.



You probably don't need the name of the restaurant, because if you are white you will not be impressed, and I don't want folks sneering on Yelp.

I might take you there, if I think you can handle it. It's regular food, as I said, nothing spectacular. I don't know if they have egg-rolls and sweet 'n sour. Maybe no kung pao either, or mu shu pork and General Tso's chicken.


Many people go there for claypot rice, of which they do a large selection. Rice cooked in a casserole, something layered on top. When it's served, you take off the lid and drizzle some soy sauce around the edge, to sizzle when it hits the hot inside surface. The slight crustiness this style of cooking gives to the rice where it touched the ceramic is part of the attraction, the stuff that cooked along in the steam is often savoury and probably bad for your heart. Salt fish and chicken, Chinese bacon, fatty pork, lahp cheung, dried meats, plus mushrooms and various vegs that benefit from the association.



MEH LEI GAA?

There were five other people there: a couple in their thirties, very Hong Kong of a likable type, a salt of the earth gentleman happily snarfing a late lunch or early dinner, and an old gentleman with his two or three year old granddaughter, who was just about the cutest thing. The child, not the grandpa. Gentle manners and well-behaved, but vibrant and curious. Pretty round face, that lovely skin that some Chinese toddlers have, and clean, neat, intensely black hair, which even from my distance looked soft and feathery. She was still at the stage of asking questions. It was her first exposure to a certain steamed pastry (he had carried her over to the counter so he could explain the items there to her), and several other things. Claypots (don't touch), a standard metal teapot ("chaa wu").
And, probably, forks.

As well as other human beings to studiously observe.

Adorable.

Having grandparents mind the kids is a splendid thing.
They grow up to be real persons.
Instead of brats.




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