Albert Cheng walks me through the menu at Chinatown staple Z&Y Restaurant on a recent Wednesday, gauging my interest in each item he points out.
“Their number two is a very Szechuan dish,” he says, the clatter of the peak lunch rush slowly building under his voice. “The Couple’s Delight. It has shank, tripe, tendon.”
I trust his judgment, honed over six decades as an influential — if low-key — gourmand, but he insists on checking in with me about each suggestion he makes. We grab a selection of dishes that hew to the Szechuan culinary tradition: sensational dan dan noodles, an addictive fried chicken tucked in among hundreds of red chiles, and a tart fish-tofu stew with pickled vegetables that Cheng says recalls sinigang, the traditional sour Filipino soup.
“This is what you eat here when you want to taste the Szechuan,” Cheng tells me.
At 75 years old, Albert Cheng is arguably one of San Francisco’s more prolific food writers-slash-influencers, although he’s hardly chasing fame. I ask him point blank if he considers himself a celebrity; he scrunches his face.
Cheng isn’t a restaurant reviewer at the San Francisco Chronicle or Eater SF; he’s not even a TikTok or Instagram food-fluencer. Instead, he shares his meals with the 140,000 members of a four-year-old Facebook group called Bay Area Eats, an audience that eats up every post.
Through this humble forum, Cheng’s plainspoken musings (which often end with a motto of sorts: “I shall return!”) have developed the power to boost up small family restaurants, many of which have struggled in the post-covid era.
His path to food micro-celebrity was a long time coming. And getting there required him to nearly lose the ability to eat all together.
Cheng, a self-proclaimed Chinoy, or Chinese-Filipino person, was born in the Philippines in 1948, a year after it gained independence from the United States.
At 16, Cheng moved to San Francisco with his family — sans his dad, who stayed back home. He went to UC Berkeley, studying bioscience with a dream of becoming a doctor. But his mother died of breast cancer in 1970, a year after he graduated college. With his father back in the Philippines, it was his responsibility to raise his siblings. He has no regrets about not becoming a doctor.
“Raising my brothers and sister was more important than my schooling, and if I didn’t do that, I probably wouldn’t have met you,” Cheng tells me with a hearty laugh.
For years, he worked in Chinatown, first at a community nonprofit and then as an administrator for San Francisco Unified. He eventually worked his way up to a job as a high-level administrator at the state’s Department of Education.
He’d already lived many lives by the time he turned 30, around the time he was diagnosed with achalasia, a rare esophageal disorder that makes it hard to swallow food or drink. His doctor gave him a devastating prognosis: He had two years left to eat solid food.
That was the beginning of his mission to spend his life, as he puts it, “eating the best stuff ever.”
“My mother died when she was 47,” he said. “I thought I would have a short life, too, so I packed a lot of living into my early years.”
It was at this point when he started going to fine dining restaurants — a lot. He name-drops the places he’s been to: Manresa, Mister Jiu’s, French Laundry, even the legendary Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago. But eventually, he grew weary of the haute cuisine experience.
“That’s two things I don’t like: I don’t like to eat [money] or drink money,” he told me. “Some of these restaurants — Saison used to be $75, now it’s like $500 and the plate is this big with two little things in the center and you come out hungry. It’s delicious! But you come out hungry.”
When he was 40, he went on a trip to visit his ancestral village. Learning about his history was so revelatory, it led him to co-found an organization called Friends of Roots, which sends Chinese-Americans with ties to the Guangdong province on their own trips to explore their personal genealogies. Those two loves — of personal histories, and of the place foods hold in cultures and traditions — are intimately intertwined for Cheng.
“How did you end up where you are today? You want to piece that history because the history that you piece is American history. American history is not white history. It’s a collection of individual histories,” he tells me.
Minutes into our meal, Cheng says, matter-of-factly, that he helped make Z&Y famous.
In 2008, the restaurant, which specialized in Yunnan cuisine and was known as Z&Y Garden, got a new owner: a former Chinese Consulate executive chef, Lijun Han, who pivoted the menu to focus primarily on Szechuan cuisine.
Cheng loved the new menu, which he mentioned to a friend, the legendary SF food critic Patricia Unterman, then at the San Francisco Examiner. She told him she’d been tasked with reviewing the newly-rebranded Z&Y, and had been disappointed by her experience.
“When I mentioned this place to her — ‘Oh, it’s so good’ — she was like, ‘It tastes terrible.’ And I told her, ‘You ordered the wrong stuff. You ordered the white people stuff.’ The chow mein and whatnot,” he says.
They went back together, after which Unterman published a glowing review, remarking on the “fine palate and artistry” of the chef, and comparing a cucumber and beef tendon dish to something one would order at the French Laundry. And credit where credit’s due: She gave Cheng a nod high-up in the article, referring to him as “a serious gourmand” who had changed her mind about the place after she had brushed it off as “pretty mundane.”
The two of them have remained close; both Cheng and Unterman are part of a group of food-loving friends that regularly dines out together, calling themselves “The Insatiables.”
He’s made a fair number of other friends in the food world over the past couple of decades, perhaps most notably with Hwa-Soon Im, owner of now-defunct, Anthony Bourdain-acclaimed To Hyang. (Cheng and Im are the subjects of a short film released over a decade ago, Eat A Good Life, which focuses on the challenges of operating a restaurant business.)
Cheng’s strategy for building these connections is simple: He endears himself to restaurant owners by asking them about their heritage and their pathways to opening up their restaurants, all with his natural charm. During our meal, he gets up and speaks briefly to restaurant co-owner Michelle Zhang and her teenage son. He comes back to our table, excitedly informing me that he hasn’t seen the boy since he was yay-big, holding his hand up to the height of our dining table.
He sees his Facebook posts, in part, as a way of writing these histories — and his own — in real time.
“If I go, my grandchildren will see and go, ‘Oh, that’s my stupid grandfather, that’s what he does,’” he tells me.
I first discovered Cheng in the spring, when the algorithmic powers of Facebook started serving up his posts on my timeline. I was immediately taken with his writing, which carries the same charm he brings to our meal: descriptive, casual, and almost always featuring a tidbit of the history of the cuisine he’s partaking in, or part of a conversation with the restaurant owner.
“I hope it’s okay,” he tells me when I tell him how much I’ve enjoyed reading his reviews. “I’m just writing what I see.”
Cheng’s guiding principle has been finding hidden, often family-owned gems and bringing them to the broader attention of his Bay Area Eats audience. The group, founded during lockdown as a way to evaluate how restaurants were adhering to covid protocols, now boasts nearly 140,000 members. Cheng is one of the most active longtime members.
“His posts are all very well detailed and you can tell he's been well-experienced with a lot of different varieties of food,” said Shane Cheng (no relation to Albert), a co-founder of the group. “I think it’s his back history that he’s able to do that.”
Albert told me he reviews about eight out of ten new restaurants he visits on Facebook. The others, he says, don’t get write-ups at all, since he’d rather say nice things than be a critic. His goal is reminiscent of TikToker Keith Lee: putting a shine on smaller, neighborhood spots that may not otherwise get covered by professional food critics.
“A multi-million dollar restaurant can get destroyed by a zero-star rating,” he tells me. “If it’s no good, leave them alone and let the public judge. That’s my take. But one word from them — people worship them and it destroys the restaurant and I don’t think it’s responsible or fair to the restaurant.”
That’s not to say his own posts don’t carry weight. He’s raved at least twice on Facebook about Buona Italia Caffe in Pacifica; owner Arturo Rodriguez told Gazetteer that the restaurant saw a significant uptick in customers after Cheng’s glowing review of the pasta. “He’s a good guy,” Rodriguez told me.
Cheng himself ran into some of his referrals on a recent visit to the restaurant.
“I was there, like, two days ago and I was ordering and there was an elderly woman behind me and her husband and friend. She showed me her phone, and asks me, ‘Is this you?,’” he says.
The couple told him they’d been visiting Buona Italia every week after reading one of his reviews. (A recent five-star Yelp review of Buona Italia also mentions being referred there by Bay Area Eats.)
Cheng reviewed another restaurant, Oodle Yunnan, months before the San Francisco Chronicle put it on a list of best new restaurants. When Cheng went back for a repeat visit, owner Sherrina Mui told him that Oodle Yunnan had experienced a big boom after his initial review. (In a brief phone interview, she told Gazetteer she remembered Cheng, but hung up shortly after to deal with an onslaught of customers.)
Cheng has some self-imposed rules for dining before he writes a review. He’ll try places alone first, and then go again with guests. And when he loves a place, he goes there often. “I want to eat somewhere until I’m bored,” he tells me.
As we wrap up our meal, we get back to talking about Cheng’s life. He turned 75 last September. He’s lived longer than both his parents and all his grandparents, a fact he doesn’t want to take for granted.
Despite the doctor’s initial, dire prediction, his achalasia symptoms have been manageable throughout the years, aside from one scare in the ‘80s that sent him to the ER for dehydration. He’s also beat both lung and kidney cancer, a fact he tosses out as a casual aside.
“Part of my journey is because my father died of cancer, so I know I’m going to get cancer,” he says, before recalling, “I did get two cancers: Cancer of the kidney and the lung in 2012. A lot of surgeries.”
Mostly, he wants to focus on all the restaurants he has left to try. He pulls out a comprehensive list on his phone’s Notes app, which runs the gamut: Georgian dumplings, a new Korean spot in Santa Clara, a halal place that just opened up in Chinatown. “There are so many!” he exclaims.
He tells me that, back when he was approaching the age of his mother’s death, he bought himself a 1948 Taylor port. He promised himself he’d drink it if he made it to 50; that turned into 60, and then 70. He has yet to drink it. Maybe, he ponders aloud, he’ll finally open it when he turns 80.
But mortality is always on his mind.
“You never know when you’ll come back,” he says, as we dig into our dan dan noodles. “I don’t want to take the chance.”
