Looking for the best Vietnam food in San Francisco leads to an address that confuses people: a Vietnamese noodle shop on the edge of Chinatown rather than in a Vietnamese neighbourhood. Golden Star is one of several, and the reason is a specific piece of history — a large share of the Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the United States after 1975 were ethnically Chinese, and they settled where the existing Chinese communities were.
Where a restaurant sits usually records how the people who opened it arrived. Ask Karpo what the story of a neighbourhood's food is before you eat your way through it.
The Hoa, and why the address makes sense
The Hoa were the ethnic Chinese population of Vietnam, concentrated in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon, and long established in commerce there. After 1975 they were targeted by the new government, and a very large proportion left — many of them among the boat people of the late seventies and early eighties.
Arriving in the United States, many settled into existing Chinatowns rather than forming separate Vietnamese districts, because they had the language, the family connections and the commercial networks already. That is why San Francisco's Chinatown and Oakland's contain Vietnamese restaurants, and why several of them serve both cuisines without any sense of contradiction.
The food carries that history. Chinese-Vietnamese cooking has its own character — more wheat noodles, more roast meats, more braises, alongside the Vietnamese repertoire — and a menu that offers both pho and Cantonese roast duck is not confused, it is accurate.
What to order at a noodle shop
Pho is the obvious order and worth judging on the broth alone: taste it before adding anything, look for clarity and a beef flavour that carries the spices rather than being buried by them.
But the interesting order at a Chinese-Vietnamese shop is frequently the other soup. Hu tieu, a southern Vietnamese noodle soup with clear pork broth and a Chinese-Cambodian lineage, comes with a choice of noodle — rice, egg or the clear chewy tapioca kind — and can be served with the broth on the side. It is the dish that most clearly shows the crossover.
Roast meats over rice are the other thing to look for. A shop with a hanging roast duck or crisp pork belly in the window is doing Cantonese work alongside the Vietnamese, and a plate of that with rice and a bowl of clear broth is one of the best cheap lunches available in any American city.
San Francisco's Chinatown, walked properly
This is the oldest Chinatown in North America and the largest outside Asia by some measures, and it is a functioning residential neighbourhood with one of the highest population densities in the United States rather than a themed district. That distinction is the key to visiting it well.
Grant Avenue is the tourist street and Stockton Street, one block over, is the neighbourhood one. Stockton is where the produce, fish and meat markets are, where the pavements are genuinely crowded with people shopping, and where the neighbourhood actually operates. Anyone who walks only Grant has not seen Chinatown.
Mornings are the time. The markets are busiest and freshest between about eight and eleven, and the alleys — narrow lanes running between the main streets, several with temples and family association buildings — are quiet enough to walk without a crowd.
Timing and practicalities
Noodle shops here run on lunch. Many open early and close in the evening, and a plan built around dinner will find a lot of shutters down. Lunch is also when the broth is at its best, since most kitchens start it before service.
Cash is worth carrying, prices are low, and turnover is fast — these are rooms where you eat and leave, not where you sit for two hours, and lingering when a queue forms is the one genuine breach of etiquette.
The neighbourhood is steep in places and the streets are crowded, so plan on walking rather than driving. It is directly adjacent to the financial district and North Beach and the walk between all three is short.
The alleys are the actual neighbourhood
Chinatown's lanes are the part that repays a slow walk. Several of them hold family association buildings — mutual aid societies organised by surname or region of origin, some over a century old — along with temples on upper floors reached by unmarked staircases, and small workshops that have been operating since long before anyone was photographing them.
They are also where the neighbourhood's history is least sanitised. The buildings went up after the 1906 earthquake, deliberately built in a stylised Chinese idiom by American architects as an argument that the community should be allowed to rebuild in place rather than be relocated out of the city centre. The look that reads as traditional is in fact a piece of successful political strategy.
Walking two or three alleys between Stockton and Grant takes fifteen minutes and changes the whole visit. Do it before lunch rather than after, when the light gets down into the lanes and before the afternoon crowds fill the main streets.
Practical notes
Golden Star is a Vietnamese noodle shop on the edge of San Francisco's Chinatown, part of a Chinese-Vietnamese diaspora pattern that placed Vietnamese restaurants inside existing Chinatowns. Taste the pho broth before adding anything, and order hu tieu or the roast meats over rice to see the Chinese-Vietnamese crossover. Go at lunch, since many shops close in the evening and the broth is best mid-day. Carry cash, eat and leave rather than lingering. Walk Stockton Street rather than Grant for the working neighbourhood, and go in the morning for the markets and the quiet alleys.
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Ask Karpo first
A neighbourhood's food usually makes sense once you know how the people who cook it got there. Ask Karpo what the history of the blocks near you is, which street is the working one, and what to order once you are on it.
