Five Top Chinatown Dim Sum Spots

Who can resist dim sum: juicy little dumplings, plates of spicy spare ribs, slices of tender eggplant stuffed with shrimp and sweet egg custard tarts? Many Chinatown restaurants double as dim sum parlors at lunch and have a great, casual atmosphere: there's lots of conversation at large round tables as food carts circulate, servers stopping to uncover each dim sum delicacy as if presenting a gift.
If it's your first time here's what happens: When the cart rolls around to your table and the dishes are uncovered point to what you'd like: typically, you start a tab and the servers mark off how many dishes you've ordered, at what price level. It's part of the fun: you don't order from a menu and choose what you like by what looks good.
San Francisco's Chinatown is going to be bustling in the next week during the New Year's celebrations. It's a terrific time to visit.

Here are some picks for ever-favorite dim sum spots (unfortunately, they don't have web sites):

*City View, 662 Commercial, between Kearny and Montgomery. This is one of the most elegant of the Chinatown restaurants and serving some of the finest dim sum around. It's the place to take less adventurous first-time dim sum diners, or those who know dim sum (there's a lot of variety here) and want fancier surroundings than many of the traditional Chinatown dim sum parlors. Try the glazed walnut prawns, scallop dumplings, pork siu mai and potstickers.

*Pearl City, 641 Jackson, between Kearny and Grant. For many San Franciscans, this is the go-to spot for dim sum. It's inexpensive, rustic and the excellent dim sum comes in large portions.

*Dol Ho, 808 Pacific, between Stockton and Powell. Don't be scared away by the drab exterior and no-frills interior. Dol Ho is authentic, with fresh dim sum that the locals recognize as the real thing. Don't miss the spare ribs.

*Gold Mountain, 644 Broadway, near Stockton. This is one of those cavernous dim sum restaurants that draw in local Chinese families by the dozens. Because of volume of dim sum served, the dim sum is fresh and there's a large variety. Try the pork buns and chive dumplings.

*Lichee Garden, 1416 Powell, between Broadway and Vallejo. This traditional Cantonese restaurant is better known for its wonderful lunch and dinner fare but also offers top dim sum at lunchtime. Good service is a notch above the rest of the dim sum establishments.

Amy Sherman of Cooking with Amy informed me Lichee no longer serves dim sum. Drats, it was so good.

Here's another favorite then: Kay Cheung at 615 Jackson near Kearny. This is one of those hole-in-the-wall Chinatown eateries that are easy to miss. Like Pearl City, which is close by, this has authentic dim sum, nothing fancy but inexpensive and good.

Do you have a favorite Chinatown restaurant for dim sum or other Chinese food? Comment, please!

And, check out my Chinatown travel app for more, including interactive maps, descriptions and photos that you can download onto your iPhone or iPod Touch.

In Chinatown: It's Happy New Year

If you're headed to San Francisco's Chinatown for the big New Year's Parade Saturday Feb. 27 get there early and make a day of it. Have a dim sum lunch and stroll off the tourist-packed streets and onto the alleys that the locals use to get around. Forty-three such alleys criss-cross Chinatown. They date back to the late 1800s when all kinds of nefarious activities took place along these narrow passageways. Look along the bottom edges of the buildings on Pagoda and Ross alleys and you'll see narrow openings boarded over or covered by steels bars. Underground opium dens, gambling parlors or brothels may have operated there. It's said some were linked to a network of tunnels where people fled to avoid police raids.
On Pagoda, my favorite of the alleys, Hang Ah Tea Room, one of the oldest of San Francisco's dim sum restaurants, continues to do a brisk business even though the decor is stuck in the 1970s. There's something charming and exotic about walking along Pagoda where you can hear the frenetic clicking of mah jong tiles behind closed doors and stepping inside this narrow little restaurant.
Hollywood also finds the alleys picturesque: scenes from the Will Smith movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" were shot along Pagoda and Ross alleys. On Ross, next to the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, where you can watch women making the cookies by hand, there's a hole-in-the-wall barber shop. Barber Jun Yu, who briefly appeared in the movie, often takes a break outside, serenading passersby on the erhu, a two-string Chinese violin.
You can often get an insider's peak at the alleys on City Guides' free tours that start from Portsmouth Square several days a week and cover many of the alleys on foot. Some of the guides are born-and-raised in Chinatown. For more places to visit and restaurants to try, check out my Chinatown travel app for iPhones/iPod Touches, which has interactive maps and more detailed information (all for .99 cents!).

San Francisco's Chinatown -- by App

San Francisco's Chinatown, a travel guide app for IPhone and IPod Touches, is available now on iTunes. I included more than 50 places in this historic neighborhood of San Francisco, which has been the heart of the city's large Chinese community since the Gold Rush. The app contains descriptions of small, tucked-away dim sum parlors, elegant seafood restaurants, the narrow alleyways that locals have used for generations to quickly wind their way through the neighborhood and avoid the tourist traffic, historic sites, unique and not-so-unique shops, quiet temples and hidden museums. The app also features interactive maps that you can use as you're exploring Chinatown and more than 150 photographs so that you can plot your day trip or weekend getaway before you leave home. The app's for sale for .99 cents, much less than a cup of coffee, through iTunes. Look for my North Beach/Fisherman's Wharf app in a few weeks.

A Moveable Feast: Walking the Embarcadero

It's out, finally. Visual Travel Tours, a California company that produces audio/visual travel programs, has released my tour of the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero.
I worked on this -- a new type of writing and photography for me -- for some time early this summer, spending several days walking the Embarcadero and getting to know the Ferry Building inside and out. I then wrote a script, uploaded dozens of photographs and Visual Travel Tours' audio/visual specialists put together a very cool program, complete with professional narration.
What is it, exactly?
It's basically a walking tour of the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero that you buy online, download and can take with you, using your cell phone, Ipod or other mobile device to follow along, learn some history and pick up tips on enjoying the area to its fullest. The tour is also available in CD format or to simply download to your computer.
Think about those audio tours at museums. It's like that. You can start and stop the program when you like.
The tour starts in front of the Ferry Building, takes you upstairs where the arrivals and departures of the old ferryboats used to be, through the new food hall and Saturday farmers' market and then north and south of the landmark building, giving history of the Embarcadero and visiting the Muni Railway Museum, the waterfront promenades and some historic sites, such as Rincon Post Office.
Today, I was back there to check out the Thursday market, which has become another culinary attraction with some terrific food booths, including Pizza Politana (which cooks up crackling pizzas in a wood-burning oven, photo at right), Korean food specialist Namu and Tacolicious from the people behind wonderful Laiola in the Marina district. In the other stalls, tomatoes and dahlias were at their most brilliant (upper photos).
For more about my walking tour check out the youtube video. Or to purchase, go to the VTT site. Enjoy!