CHEESE BUREK / BOREK

MASHED FAVA BEAN DISHES (e.g, FUL)

MIDDLE EASTERN BOILED DUMPLINGS (e.g., MANTI)

PASTA WITH PEAS

Did you look on opentable or call the booked restaurants already? Calling them might get you a seat! Good luck and enjoy SF!

Plot all this on google maps and calculate transportation time. You might be overbooked, especially given the popularity of your food destinations.

Skip Chestnut St--- walk along the water instead. Great views as you approach the Palace of Fine arts and then Golden Gate Bridge.

Swan's, recommended above, will have you waiting in line for well over an hour. Sotto Mare is a great suggestion and they take reservations, at least for dinner.Are you open for Chinese seafood?

Brunch at Bar Tartine or Tartine Bakery? Both excellent, but totally different things and only the Bakery has pastries. The former takes reservations, the latter has hour long lines. Grayelf's suggestion to hit the bakery earlier is a great idea. Get as much walking done in the Mission as you can before Bar Tartine.

Ice Cream Bar is a few block detour from Haight Ashbury as you approach the park. Get the shakes or some of the weird stuff if that appeals, but skip the standard sounding things. Baked goods are not a strength of that part of the city.

After such a full day at dinner at MM, which I find heavy, I'd be too tuckered out to hit a bar. Caffeinate well, my friend :-)

Sunday is really busy for a 7pm flight, but doable. Plan your transportation well ...

The menu linked above is no longer in place. Here is the current one for dinner: http://www.enjoyveggie.com/pdfs/dinne...

At the Kirkham (Sunset) location, we had a decent meal. We ate, in categories we devised to help focus our usage of the menu:

Soup
# 24 Small reishi medicine soup : The broth was strong and kind of bitter, and it contained a few different dried mushrooms and gluten. As a base, it was fine and I'm freezing the leftovers for cooking, but as a soup it's not something I found very appealing.

Fatty pork
# 44 sliced fatty pork w/ sweet mustard greens and napa cabbage : Trippy. It's sliced so that it mimics a piece of pork with a 3/4" square of fat attached. The "pork" is gluten, and the "fat" is yam flour according to the above post (I thought it was mung bean jelly). The mustard greens gave this dish some depth, but at times it felt like I was eating just another dish with "brown sauce." I think there might have been honey in this.

"Fresh" fish
# 47 walnut prawns w/ mayo sauce : The mayo had a nice tang, the walnuts had a great brittleness, and some sesame seeds rouded everything out. I've had better batter elsewhere, but we loved this dish. It's proof that the shrimp in the original dish isn't necessary for flavor and is more of a vehicle for the contrast of mayo, "fried," and walnuts. When the ocean gets depleted of anything living, this will be my soylent haven.

Preserved/Salty fish
# 82 salty fish, chicken, soft tofu clay pot : pieces of the "fish" had seaweed attached to them. I would have liked more depth to the base.

Fungi
# 59 pea sprouts with ginger : Answering Melanie's questions above, they were out of stir fried yam leaves, a choy, and ong choy. I've purchased a choy and ong choy recently, so their absence isn't a seasonal issue. We instead got the pea sprouts with bai ling mushroom (Pleurotus ferulae) on top for an additional $4. As a dish, it didn't make much sense--- the mushrooms aren't cut up much, so you have to nibble on them a piece at a time without any pea sprouts. I really liked the silky texture of the mushrooms and their savory flavor.

# 109 Spinach and pine nut fried rice : this seemed to be a popular dish, but it doesn't have a lot of flavor despite the appearance. I would have preferred plain brown rice.

As an omnivore and someone who is generally a sucker for bold flavors, this obviously isn't my kind of cuisine. That said, it would have been nice to see more seasonal preparations or ingredients different from the palate of American Chinese restaurants minus the MSG and alliums. There are a few other dishes I'd check out in the future--- the cordyceps Mushroom, Fresh Mt. Yam w/ Lily & Ginko Nuts sounds interesting and was something we meant to order.

Thank you so much for the Huangshan advice! We're actually staying at the Shilin, and I hadn't yet booked our Tangkou hotel yet. I'll take your advice to stay near the bus terminal.

Yeah, there's not a lot of information about local specialties out there. I have low expectations for the food, but some dishes listed for the region on various tourist sites are Preserved Mandarin Fish (Chou Guiyu), Steamed Chukar Chicken, Bamboo Shoots on Wenzheng Hill (wen zheng shan sun), & Wax Gourd Dumplings. I need to do some reading on the boards about dishes from other regions of Anhui in hopes we might encounter them...

Cool, thanks for the clarification. The images I've seen at Jia Jia Tang Bao looked identical to what's sold as XLB in SF (SF's are smaller than the "soup dumplings" of Joe's Shanghai in NYC), but I suppose it's difficult to get a sense of perspective until you pick one up with chopsticks.

I am really excited about the Sheng Jian Bao at Yang's. We have competent XLB in SF, but none of the SJB have approached the photos or what's been described, and none have soup inside.

Good luck with the recreation! I'd love to hear how it turns out.

BTW, if you want to try out a steamed bun version of the dish, here's a link on where to get unfilled steamed buns:
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/668751

Oh, excellent-- crab dumplings here we come!

I've found some confusing threads on the distinction between "tang bao" and "xiao long bao." Perhaps someone can clarify.

The best xiao long bao, at least the ones in San Francisco, fill about half a spoonful of soup and have a delicate wrapper.

There are giant "tang bao," soup heated in giant dumpling skin that not everyone seems to eat, and which is drank through a straw. Other than the novelty factor, what makes these worth seeking out?

Descriptions of the another kind of "tang bao" are confusing me. In http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/653820#5111483 , someone says that "tang bao" and xlb are synonymous in Shanghai. Elsewhere, I've seen pictures of some "tang bao" sold at DTF which are smaller than typical XLB, pleated on the side touching the steamer, and served alongside actual soup. Friends who were in Taiwan last year told me that "tang bao" are like XLB, only with a higher percentage of soup in them (that makes sense since "tang" means soup). Is there some method to the madness, or is "tang bao" just a marketing term?

Tang Bao vs. Xiao Long Bao
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/653820#5107596

Giant Tang Bao
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/439971

Hairy crab won't be in season for another few months :-(. If they have an XLB that uses an in season kind of crab, I'll go for it--- in the SF Bay Area, the crab XLB tend to be more expensive, but unnoticeably difference from pork XLB. I understand also that the ones in China are more likely to use crab roe than the ones in the US, so that'll be an exciting improvement too.

"Eat. Enjoy. Repeat." Very good advice. We shouldn't be limiting ourselves to XLB at one place! Any recommendations for XLB beyond DTF and Yang's, and any other interesting varieties beyond the basics? I've identified a few places in previous posts, but these are a difficult enough thing to make that a chef change could make a difference and I'd want up to date info.

Thanks for the tips! I'm conflicted about DTF--- everyone says they're as good as or better than Yang's and complains about the prices. It's a safe bet though, so we might head there on our first night.

Oh cool, thanks for the salad tip--- the dishes I seem to be most interested in for this trip seem not be on the healthier end of things so that'll be a good choice.

I'll add Power Station of Art to the list. So much to do!

L'Osteria Del Forno is pretty affordable, and specializes in the food of Emilia Romagna. I think the best things here aren't particularly compatible with a diet :-)

Caffe Baonecci has great pizza (roman style, if I recall correctly)

Cotogna, which is very popular on this board and difficult to secure a spot at, is .4 miles from BBB. Their vegetable sides are excellent. About as far in the opposite direction is Albona, an Istrian restaurant (kind of hybrid of cuisines of Croatia & and Italy).

I'm heading to Shanghai from San Francisco in early June. As the two of us fill in our activity itinerary, I'll post with more questions about specific locations and restaurants. In the meantime, I have a few questions about what has been planned below.

We're only interested in eating Chinese food. I'd like to focus on food from Shanghai and the nearby regions, but would be game for other Chinese dishes/regional cuisines unobtainable in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We'll also be heading to Huangshan, so if you have any tips about that, let me know!

Are there any seasonal specialties we should be on the lookout for? The only one I've read about is 五香烤子魚 / Wǔxiāng kǎoziyú / Five-spice roasted anchovy.

Our verbal language skills are nil, but we're both skilled at pointing to whatever other people are eating, and I plan to research dishes so that I can recognize their characters on a menu.

=Sunday=
Dinner : someplace Shanghainese and easily accessible from the East Nanking Road metro. Suggestions besides what's below?

=Monday=
Breakfast:
- Yangs dumplings -- shengjianbao
- Jia jia tang bao -- xiao long bao
Lunch: Lan Ting
Drink: at top of Kathleen 5 or Ritz Carlton
Dinner : Southern barbarian -- yunnan eggplant cold starter, yunnan cheese starter, pork with yunnan sauerkraut, spiced BBQ whole fish

=Tuesday-Thursday=
Breakfast: corner of yanqing Lu and donghu Lu for scallion pancakes
Travel to Tunxi, Tangkou, and Huangshan. No idea where to eat ...

=Friday=
Lunch: street food at Muslim Market. Any must haves?
Tea : afternoon tea at the Park Hyatt
Dinner: Reservations already made for Jesse @ 41 Tianping Lu. Placed an order for red braised pork (外婆红烧肉) and braised green onion fish head (葱烧鱼头). Will order the wild herbs wrapped in tofu.

=Saturday=
Lunch: street food at Sipailou Lu. Any must haves?
Dinner: Reservations made at Fu 1088. Thinking of getting the drunken chicken with frozen wine, sauteed pea shoots and a pork, chicken sweet shrimp sautee with mushrooms, Shizitou lion's head in consomme, Sliced chicken with sour apples, deep fried yellow fish fingers with seaweed (tai tiao yu tiao).

Thanks!

I'm not sure exactly what you've cut from your diet. You might consider Park Tavern if you don't want Italian, or if you do want Italian, Sotto Mare has good SF seafood specialities. The dishes I like best at the Italian places in the neighborhood aren't ideal for losing weight...

Before or after BBB, head to the Vallejo garage next to the police station. Take the elevator to the 5th floor--- has the best view of the area.

Ha, it is difficult to keep all the sauces from running into one another on your plate. One way to avoid that happening is to spill most of your food on the tablecloth :-)

They gave chopsticks, but no spoon for the dan dan noodles. I'll try them again next time I'm in the neighbood and make an actual effort to stir things up. MG's proximity to Oren's Hummus is going to make for some great take-out dinners.

MaMa's Vietnamese Cuisine, a few hundred feet from Little Shanghai in San Mateo, caught my eye so I stopped in for a banh xeo. With tax, it cost a little bit over $9.

Along with the crepe they serve lettuce, cilantro, pickled daikon & carrot (they serve banh mi here), thick cucumber chunks, and a fish sauce dipping sauce. Pretty basic compared to some of the other reports for this month.

The crepe started out with a strong coconut flavor and was way too greasy. The inside was filled with cooked bean sprouts and shrimp fixed into the pancake. There were also a few loose shrimp coated in pasty uncooked batter. This was fine when wrapped in lettuce and dipped in fish sauce, but the crepe itself left much to be desired.

Thanks for the context, Thomas. With the exception of pickled chili dishes and the kung pao chicken soup, I'm fairly certain the remainder of their dishes are available elsewhere at varying levels of quality. While it would be nice to have one-stop-shopping from a restaurant with a small but well executed menu, it is nice to have places that serve dishes you can't find elsewhere.

BTW, how many places in the Bay Area do the brick of tofu preparation of Ma Po tofu? I've had it served that way one time in my life, and it's been in the past year in the Bay Area. Could it have been Spices III? They showed me that they use Wo Chong brand of tofu, but I can't recall if it's in a brick or not.

I thoroughly enjoyed this meal! Thanks to Melanie for organizing!

= Tops =
- 麻辣牛筋 Spicy Numbing Beef Tendon
- 夫妻肺片 Hot & Spicy Beef Combination aka "Husband & Wife" : the meat was moister than most renditions I've tried.
-口水雞（黃毛雞）Sliced Chicken with House Spicy Sauce : AKA mouth watering chicken (yellow haired chicken)
- 川味麻婆豆腐 Szechuan Tofu aka "Mapo Tofu" (ordered extra spicy) : It had a bold flavor that I really enjoyed, but I would have liked a bit more heat. I'd like to eat MG's version side by side with the one at Spices III. The use of beef vs. pork didn't make much of a difference tastewise--- either's quantity in Mapo Tofu is so minimal, that I've always considered their presence more of a textural contribution.
- 水煮牛 Poached Beef in Hot Chili Oil (ordered extra spicy) : "water boiled beef"

= Also very good =
- 酸菜魚片 Pickled Mustard with Fish Fillet
- 重慶辣子雞 Spicy Chicken Wings in Chongqing Style (ordered extra spicy) : Thanks to PekoePeony for generously offering me a portion from her plate! That piece didn't retain much flavor or spice from the chilis, but had a lovely crunch and good amound of meat on the bone.
- 川味潑辣魚 Fish Fillet Buried in Chili Pepper Soup
- 川味魚香茄 Eggplant in Hot Garlic Sauce Szechuan Style : the dusting of rice flour (?) was light, and it stayed crunchy despite the sauce. Not at all oily.
麻辣黃瓜 Cucumber with Spicy Numbing Sauce : refreshing

= Good =
川味旦旦麵 Szechuan Dan-Dan Noodle (2 orders) : not just for heat but for lathering, I would have liked more chili oil and less sesame paste or peanuts. Noodles could have used more bounce.

= Neutral =
火爆腰花 Stir Fried Pork Kidney
泡椒墨魚仔 Pickled Chili with Baby Cuttlefish

= Didn't care for =
孜然羊 Cumin Lamb : the cumin was too musky and not enough wok char to the lamb. I also prefer versions with fewer vegetables and bigger slices (fresh chilis are okay)
Sesame Ball Soup : I did like the soup base, but the mochi didn't have much bounce and their flavor was too subdued

Most of the dishes had a good balance, so I didn't really diminish my enjoyment when then the spicing wasn't strong enough. Another reason is related to mdg's comment about there being a variety of levels of spice and flavor profiles. We ordered really well, and despite there being about as much red on the table (and tablecloth) as a Tarantino movie, no two dishes tasted the same.

It's interesting to hear people's varied opinions both during and after the meal, especially about spicing--- I think part of it is that not everyone gets a portion from the same part of the plate!

Thanks!

Having photos pop up to the top is a good way to remind people to post photos.

On the iPhone, at least, between the "Home>Chowhound>" and the title of the post, there's an abbreviated version of the title of the post followed by "...". Is that intentional, and if so, what purpose does this serve? It's redundant information that disappears when you scroll down anyway.

LOL, I misremembered this thread as being about Lolinda.

I was at Lolo this past weekend.

The Octopus Tiradito took us aback for a second--- the sliced octopus was submerged in oil and ailoli and wasn't visible until you poked it with a fork. In a similar respect, the sauce, which also included pimenton, overpowered the octopus so this dish was best eaten after wiping away much of the sauce. After doing that, I enjoyed this quite a bit on top of the complementary bread--- it didn't jibe with the grilled bread served with the dish.

Fried shishito peppers. Nicely done.

Huitlacoche and Requeson : a clever Mexican-Italian fusion. It's essentially hankerchief pasta with pesto, only substituting cheese stuffed folded in half wontons for hankerchief pasta. The wontons were a tad overcooked, but actually less so than the last time I had hankerchief pasta at an Italian restaurant. The earthy huitlacoche and pine nuts helped round out the dish, but the sauce was a bit too rich. I'd get this again.

With the outdoor seats, you can benefit from any music being played at Cafe Revolution.

Yup! It's at Monterey Deli in SF. Confirming the below post, I saw it two weeks ago:

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/8925...

It was part of an 80 root beer tasting I attended in SF two weekends ago, so I'm guessing you can find it elsewhere. Come to think of it, I think I might have seen it at the Fizzary in the Mission. Try also the candy store in Rockridge across from the Safeway.

Be mindful of a potentially long wait at Zazie. Park Chow has a much larger space and shouldn't be too crowded.

Seriously, Westerners didn't like bone-in meats in the 19th century? I always assumed that was a more recent phenomenon.

It closed Jan 1st, 2013 :

http://rockridge.patch.com/articles/c...

Now that you mention it, "semolina flour" is kind of a weird term.

Flour or not, are couscous and Italian commercial dry pasta made from the semolina that's processed in the same way? Various cookbooks talk about using coarse vs. fine semolina, but it's difficult to find products labeled one way or the other.

I think that, traditionally, pasta is made from fine semolina and couscous is made from coarse semolina. This is based upon the (1) the Wright quote above, (2) Bugialli saying that "throughout Italy, in places untouched by a medieval presence, I found the use of a hard wheat more coarsely ground than the usual Italian semolina. And this wheat is prepared with the same method of rubbing water into the coarse grain as is used for couscous." and (3) Ada Boni's "Italian Regional Cooking" couscous recipe which describes making it from coarse semolina or a mixture of coarse and fine semolina.

Whether modern/industrialized techniques use the same grain size of semolina, I have no idea.

Thanks for those videos. Cool stuff. The first video indicates that couscous is made from "semolina flour" as opposed to the crushed but unground semolina I cited above. I think that may because the couscous sold in the US is typically, labeled that way or not, "instant couscous." See http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/5926... and the replies.

Your cite to the OCF made me thing about looking at Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. He says that couscous is made from whole wheat flour that is rubbed. Because rubbing doesn't promote gluten development, he says the technique can be applied to other grains. Celiac sufferers take note!

Also according to McGee, Israeli couscous is an extruded pasta invented in Israel in the 1950s. Assuming you need some gluten formation to get stuff through an extruder, at least that one is an actual pasta.

Sidenote. Bugialli cites similar preparations to fregola in other regions of Italy: Manfregoli (Tuscany), Manfrigoli (Romagna), Fregoli (Trentino).

Couscous and fregola are commonly referred to as pastas, but as I understood them to be made before writing this post, they're not. I'll explain:

- Pasta in the general sense consists of a ground flour and some liquid
- Couscous is made from husked and crushed, but unground, semolina of hard wheat using water to bind them (see Clifford Wright, a Mediterranean Feast)

If you agree with the above two statements, couscous is not a pasta.

Giuliani Bugialli's cookbooks (Foods of Sicily & Sardinia; Bugialli on Pasta) describe the technique for making fregola by hand. Couscous is spread on a platter and drizzled with a mixture of water, egg, salt, and saffron. The grains are rubbed until they absorb some amount of liquid, and then baked. They are cooled, and the process repeats a few times as the grains form little balls. My hat goes off to anyone who has successfully done this...

Given that couscous isn't a pasta, neither is fregola, which is made up of couscous.

The high price of fregola has always made me think it was because it was made in an industrialized variant of this traditional technique. Some google searches I just did are making me rethink that. There are recipes online that make fregola out of a regular pasta dough. Here's one that toasts pellets of extruded pasta dough http://www.starchefs.com/events/studi... . If that's what's being served and sold in the US as fregola, it's most definitely a pasta.

Yeah, the tasting menu had lots of interesting items not on the regular menu. But for our dinner this week, we wound up going a la carte to accommodate the timing of our plans afterwards. FYI, the tasting menu would have cost us about $50 extra per person.

"Stand-outs" is a tough call--- the menu has too many seasonal items. Some of the best things we had...

The duck confit basteeya was as excellent as this post promised. I wouldn't split this across more than four people though.

The spreads were also excellent. The chickpea spread was nothing like the hummus I expected, and was instead sieved smooth and cut with green garlic. The piquillo-almond spread was the had the best matched texture for the grilled flatbread, and was reminiscent of muhammara minus any tart elements. The yogurt contained dill and salmon roe and were better paired with the cucumber slices than the flatbread.

The other stand-outs for me were the semolina-based pseudo-pastas (fregola and couscous):

The fregola upstaged the cornish hen it had accompanied. It absorbed a lot of savory flavor (I forgot to ask from what), and had a light chewiness.

The couscous with peas, mint, large pea shoots, and pine nuts could be treated as an entree or something to split across a group. They nailed every aspect of this dish. The pea shoots that topped the couscous were well picked and tender.