Once upon a time, two people got married and had a baby (in approximately that order) and settled in the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. They were very greedy. They ate things like Wendy’s bacon cheeseburgers and Domino’s Pizza and one of them insisted on frequenting Red Lobster for her birthday. They thought The Stinking Rose was about one of the best possible restaurants.
But they were so greedy that they ate EVERYTHING they came across, and, gradually, their greediness gained focus. They started grubbing on hand-made breads and pizzas at Arizmendi Bakery. They discovered home cooking and learned to make their own salad dressing. They tiptoed into Say Cheese and never looked back.
And they found Chowhound, by accident, featured in a Calvin Trillin article.
(And then they stopped speaking about themselves in the third person.)
We fell passionately in love with Chowhound. We took the tips very seriously. Top commenters were household names, at least in our house. (“If Melanie Wong says the ramen’s good, the ramen’s good.”) Back then, Chowhound was just a series of giant HTML pages with a gray background. There were entire boards dedicated to complaining about the site. It was massively slow, almost completely unsearchable. But the San Francisco Chowhound board taught us everything about eating locally — and eating very well.
Chowhound changed everything we ate. We visited every Farmer’s Market in the city. We ate the best ice cream, the best sushi, the best hamburger, the best donut. We didn’t eat “Mexican food” anymore, we ate Salvadorean pupusas and Mexico City-style tortas. A hankering for “Chinese food” brought Shanghainese dragon’s head meatballs or Hakka steamed bacon with dried mustard greens or Spices! Restaurant, where, we discovered, a multicourse meal of improbable spiciness could leave us with two wine glasses’ worth of buzz.
We visited Gary Danko for an incredible, intimate birthday dinner that stretched long after closing, and we ate sausages standing up at Rosamunde Grill. Chowhound didn’t discriminate. Members of that community saw good food not as a hierarchy, with The French Laundry at the apex and a million hole-in-the-wall joints at the bottom, but a continuum of delicious tastes and communal experiences.
Out of all these restaurants, all these dining experiences both exalted and not-so, we hesitated to visit one restaurant: Jai Yun.
Reviews were never mixed, always full of superlatives (“the best Chinese food I have ever had”). The restaurant is small, and boasts a single chef. There is no menu. The chef sends out whatever he feels like cooking, and you can choose a variety of price points, based on what you feel like paying. The ideal number of people in a party is supposedly six, and we could never seem to think up a group that didn’t contain at least one vegetarian.
Also we were a little intimidated — it sounded almost like omakase, in which you approach a sushi chef and respectfully put your palate in his capable hands. There are rules governing omakase, many ways to look like a jackass, and we figured the same might be true of Jai Yun.
Every year or so, we remembered Jai Yun, that Holy Grail of San Francisco Chinese dining (“best Chinese food outside Hong Kong!”) and somehow forgot.
Until January, when we were offered the birthday opportunity of a lifetime: a half-off dinner at Jai Yun coupled with very sweet last-minute babysitting. Done and done.
Jai Yun’s interior is, to put it bluntly, unprepossessing. I expected a tiny, shadowy room lit by candlelight, where diners spoke in whispers, but I was wrong. It’s the number of tables that’s small, not the restaurant. That accounted for the feeling of smallness as well as the feeling of silence: there were only two other parties there, and though we were all chatting animatedly amongst ourselves, there was by no means a lot of noise.
We ordered the $50/person meal and waited to be amazed. We were.
This is the list of dishes we received, in order. There are some photos but we were too greedy to document everything.
Marinated celery
Beef with Szechuan peppercorn sauce (numbing spicy)
Shaved lotus (very gingery)
Wakame salad (a take on the one often served in Japanese restaurants)
Cabbage with pickled ginger
Vegetarian goose (one of my favorite Shanghai specialties)
Chopped tofu with cilantro
Marinated cucumber
Julienned jellyfish
Enoki mushrooms with cellophane noodles and tripe
Marinated radish
Abalone egg white omelet
Seitan with bamboo shoots, asparagus and ginger
Taro balls with pork
Mustard greens with edamame and tofu
Shrimp with chickpeas and bell peppers
Mung beans with Chinese bacon, cellophane chow fun noodles, and leek greens
Hands down, my very favorite. I have never seen clear chow fun noodles; they were shimmery, they reflected the light, they melted in the mouth, they were dream noodles.
Orange beef with pork cracklings on top (!)
Gingko nuts with squash
Kung pao chicken with Szechuan peppercorns
Chinese celery with fish cake
Slow-braised pork shoulder (another Shanghainese dish)
Corn with fish
Seared eggplant
Jai Yun will be one of our favorite restaurant memories. We were enchanted by each small dish, brought out individually. Every single dish (and there were many dishes!) was perfectly balanced and flavored. All four of us liked EVERYTHING.
I wish we had done this years ago, but it’s probably for the best that we did it now. We have many fewer fancy-dining experiences now than we used to, making Jai Yun a dining high point for 2010 (though the year is, admittedly, not yet half over). Also, it’s nice to know that our expectations were not, in any way, too high.
Apparently, some things do stay the same. Again, nice to know.
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