San Dong Best (Geary & 2nd in SF)

Regrettably I have just found out that San Dong Best has closed.

Been a few months since we visited our favorite Chinese restaurant on Geary. Perfect time to go, just after the Fungus Fair. Above is Lotus Root with Ginger.

Hand-made Pork, Shrimp & Chive Dumplings.

Xinjiang Chicken with Wide Noodle. Sometimes called Dan Pan Ji (Big Plate Chicken). Says it serves 2-4 People, but I gotta tell you, we both had ample helpings at dinner, then today for lunch, and there's a humongous portion still left. Apparently the original dish is Uyghur, and was mainly about chicken bones, which were leisurely sucked upon. These are bone-in chopped chicken pieces, and extremely spicy in terms of Szechuan peppers, plus you can see how the dish is festooned with red chiles. Pretty salty, though what hits your palette isn't just salt, but a mix of spices, including Star Anise, Cinnamon, Black Pepper, Ginger, Garlic--basically the greatest hits of Chinese Five Spices and more.

Beef Noodle at San Dong Best. Those are hand-pulled noodles, made in-house from scratch.

Note the ingenious fix to our teapot!

Definitive Lotus Root dish, sauteed with chile & ginger.

Cumin Lamb. Soulful and bright.

Beef Noodle Bowl, note the scissors, which is a great idea for cutting the very long noodles. Beefy chile stock, baby bok choy and luscious shittake mushroom.

For some odd reason, I seem not to have blogged about this great new Chinese Restaurant in Inner Richmond. They do great Szechuan, they do great pulled noodles and in-house dumplings, and mostly they do cuisine reminiscent of Shandong, the northern Chinese city near the Korean border. There's several other high profile restaurants doing this too, including San Tang, and all of those have been great as well. Every time we've been here, we've been blown away by their cuisine.

Eggplant entree. That's eggplant sauteed with onion, baby bok choy, mushroom & cabbage in a sauce that includes Sesame (Robin thinks Sesame Oil), and a meat stock, which to me tastes like a combo of pork and chicken. Let's not mince words: this is cuisine on a par with French cuisine as served in the US. 

A few shots of Robin wrassling with the in house made noodles.

You get the idea. This is Mutton Noodle, with a bit of cilantro & seaweed. Amazing. That bowl is more than enough for one person, and $1.05 less than ten bucks.

Finally, the Shrimp and Chive Dumplings arrived. Last shot: dipping dumplings in chile oil. Look at that texture on the dumplings. Juicy and hot inside!