Burnt My Fingers

Street food crawl success: dinuguan, garlic rice, lechon kawali.

Back in the Bay Area after a COVID-mandated absence, we resolved to make up for lost time by hitting as many ethnic eating spots as possible. This was literally street food because most indoor dining rooms were still closed—so the meals would be eaten in the car, in parks or just standing on the curb outside the restaurant. Plus the places we visited featured the strong, primal flavors you would think of as street food in Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam and any number of foreign destinations we were unable to visit as of now.

KFC from First Korean Market.

Our original plan was to rent a car and head east from San Francisco across the Bay Bridge, thus avoiding the toll, then down to the Asian meccas of Union City and Milpitas and ultimately back up the peninsula side. But all the places we wanted to try turned out to be on the peninsula so we headed due south instead. First stop was King’s Thai Cuisine 1 on Clement Street, where we ordered our favorite #3 beef noodle soup with stew meat and tendon. The takeout meal presented an immediate challenge because we got a quart container filled to the brim with stock and meat, and a second container with noodles, veggies and condiments. We ate standing up by our rental car, using the roof as a table, slurping up the soup until there was enough room to add the noodles. It was sloppy, and delicious.

Poke from Suruki Supermarket.

We had just learned the first lesson of street food crawling: prepare before you go. Buy some inexpensive big plastic bowls and plates (after our messy meal, we got ours at the Kamei housewares store on Clement) and keep them in your rental car along with towels, bandanas and perhaps a change of clothes. And bring lots of quarters because the meters often won’t recognize your credit card, and parking fines are brutal in San Francisco.

What next? We wanted some Korean food, but the place we chose did not answer the phone and so we stopped at the nearby First Korean Market for some of their always excellent chicken wings, which were a fixture at school events when our kids attended a Korean immersion language program. Then we realized what we really wanted was Filipino food, specifically the steam table food we remember at a lunch place in the Atwater district of Los Angeles, and more specifically a stew called dinuguan, made with black cubes of pork blood. Yelp led us to a hole in the wall called Mekeni; we would return more than once in search of our bloody quarry. They weren’t serving dinuguan that day but we picked up excellent portions of Filipino menudo (completely different than the Mexican variety) and sinigang, a sour soup.

Steam table at Que Hong.

Mekeni is in Daly City, which turns out to be the Filipino dining epicenter of the Bay Area. We chose Mekeni over other establishments because it has steam tables (you could see them in the posted photos) and you could buy ala carte vs a combo plate. Second rule of street food crawling: look (on Yelp, Tripadvisor or Google) for places with search food results like “Filipino steam table” or “Vietnamese fast food”. Then, comb the reviews for comments such as “tastes like what my gramma made back home”.

That strategy led us, on another day, to Que Hong in the Viet Town section of East San Jose. Ordering here presented a challenge because the lighted menus on the wall had been taken down and none of the dishes were labeled. Luckily another customer helped us out (something that is likely to happen often on a street food crawl—regular customers, as well as counter folks, are delighted that you’re trying their food) and we ended up with a solid meal of fried spare ribs sweetened with palm sugar and a side of bitter melon with octopus.

It’s a 50-mile drive from San Francisco to San Jose, which we made with the radio off even though there are some excellent stations in the Bay Area. Perhaps you spent some time backpacking abroad in your younger years. Remember that feeling of eternal in-the-moment vigilance, for your own safety but also because you didn’t want to miss anything? Street food foraging is like that. You have a hypothetical destination but you need to be ready to change course at any moment and you are focused on all the external factors that might trigger that.

Steam table at Kusina Na Tess.

Other spots we hit, on one day or another, included Suruki, a Japanese market in San Mateo with very fresh and high quality sushi-grade fish (we ordered yellowtail, our favorite; a frozen saba which we defrosted in our hotel room; and a poke bowl on the correct assumption that day-old fish from this place would be better than sushi in most places); Little Lucca, a popular sandwich spot in South San Francisco that made a big but not particularly distinctive house special on a Dutch crunch roll; Gai Chicken Rice in SF’s Castro District to satisfy our yen for Hinanese chicken (street food standouts are not always holes in the wall; this trendy spot is universally rated best in the city for this dish); and Pho Ha Noi, a solid Vietnamese place in San Jose that rewarded the street food crawler with excellent soup and outdoor seating.

If you’re keeping score, we’re still waiting for our dinuguan. We finally found it on the very last day, after we had turned in the car, at a place right in San Francisco called Kusina Na Tess. We’d avoided this place initially because Yelp said it was in Union Square which is full of tourist spots, but in fact it’s in the adjacent and much seedier Tenderloin. It had steam tables, a steady stream of Doordash drivers picking up orders, and excellent dinuguan which we ordered with garlic rice and lechon kawali (crispy fried pork belly with the skin on).

Mission accomplished, it was time to head for the airport. But not, of course, without stopping at Saigon Sandwich for a couple of bahn mi (special combination and grilled pork) for the long plane ride home.