“I got you this because I know you like it”, a smiling, slightly tipsy man said as he plonked down two coffee cups half full of Hennessy. He raised his own glass, we ‘Yam sing”d and he walked off.
It was the opening day of the Washington cafe, huge floral arrangements decorated the florescent doorway and tangerine plants covered the floor.
The Washington cafe took over the space that was previously operated by New King Tin, a place I frequented until it was shut down for health violations, and will write an obituary of at a later date. One day I was walking to New King Tin and saw the owners piling into a airport shuttle and asked; ” Oh, are you going on vacation ” the answer I got from the matron was a hurried and exasperated ‘yes yes’ as she loaded children and boxes into the van and took of never to be seen again. Four months later, Washington Cafe came onto the scene.
Part of a larger group of restaurants of a similar ilk, I have heard the Washington Cafe referred to as a ‘cafeteria style’ ‘hong Kong style cafe”; by various people. It is a collection of about 12 tables, a menu of about 150 items and operating hours that last well into the night.
Having been to the cafe many times since it’s opening I got to know the owner. We have shared bottles of wine and Hennessy while talking about what owning and operating a restaurant is like in Chinatown; in the business we call this talking shop, or bitching about work; either way, It’s important to have other restaurant owners to talk to about this kind of thing; preferably over a glass of poor cognac.
During the first months of their operation they focused on cheap and simple Cantonese style food. The chef is a friend and ‘student’ of Truman Du of Pot Sticker/Spicy king – but goes in a different direction. The chef here has a crowd who don’t like anything too unusual, so the food stays typically Cantonese, however, as we are in San Francisco, not China, typically Cantonese here means Cantonese food as you would get in China, not ‘typical’ or ‘non unusual’ for those of us not versed in Cantonese cuisine. This is an important distinction to make; lots of places play it safe, but Washington Cafe plays it safe in a whole different way; safe to a community who don’t want to assimilate to the western palate – and that’s what makes the food here interesting. Without going into too much detail, I like the spicy chicken feet, beef stew, and the Quails Pot.
Then as they had been opened a few months, they installed hot pot plates in every table, and now offer some great and inexpensive hot pot, and if I had enough friends to go to these places en masse, I would eat it all the time.
The crowd is great, and if you visit on a Saturday night after 10pm be prepared for older men playing cards, drinking cognac, eating hot pot (crab), and generally being raucous. As a veteran of the Chinatown bar scene, I can safely say that its’ 90% non Chinese in the bars here, and that most locals tend to drink with friends at restaurants. The best upside to this is that you can bring any booze you want into any restaurant in Chinatown and not have a problem.
Aslo, plenty of Hong Kong Cinema is always on the TVs, and even if the servers don’t understand, they will write the name of the movie down and you can go an get it pretty easily in any store around.
Aslo, plenty of Hong Kong Cinema is always on the TVs, and even if the servers don’t understand, they will write the name of the movie down and you can go an get it pretty easily in any store around.
XO sauce –
This place introduced me to XO sauce; a Hong Kong sauce made with various dried seafood and aromatics. Apparently it’s all the rage in Hong Kong and is in fact named after the XO brandys (and marketed the same way, in fancy boxes and even uses the XO(extra old) distinction brandys use). The Washington Cafe will put it on everything and anything, and with good result. It offers a fermented seafood flavor, umami and salty, in a dark ‘demi-glas esque’ preparation, it might even have brandy in it.
There is something going on with Hong Kong and brandy; XO sauce clearly marks the trend, and friends in Shanghai or anywhere else in mainland china don’t report a predilection for hennessy, so it has to be a Hong Kong or diaspora thing.
John Hutt 