There are an estimated 4,000 restaurants in San Francisco collectively serving up tens of thousands of dishes. For Gazetteer SF, food enthusiast and man-about-town Omar Mamoon is recommending the best ones. This is Order Up.
Every year a restaurant comes along and captures the attention of the press followed by eager diners and, if all goes well, awards and accolades.
Last year, that restaurant was Four Kings, the soulful Cantonese spot in Chinatown which was called “a rowdy good time” by the San Francisco Chronicle’s MacKenzie Chung Fegan and was named Restaurant of The Year by Esquire. (I’m proud to say yours truly had a hand in that one.)
This year’s top contender is Happy Crane in Hayes Valley. Run by the London-born, Hong Kong-raised chef James Yeun Leong Parry, Happy Crane has already garnered raves, favorable press, and long waits by eager patrons.
Parry moved to Hong Kong when he was just six, but eventually moved back to England to study business as an undergrad. It was only upon graduation that he realized cooking was his passion, but it was a little late for culinary school. “My parents were like, there’s no way — we’ve just paid for university,” says Parry.
Instead, Parry sent a letter to the chef at Bo Innovation, a modern fine-dining restaurant in Hong Kong that was one of the most celebrated contemporary Chinese restaurants in the world at the time.
“I just wrote an email saying that, Hey, I have no kitchen experience, but I do speak Cantonese and Mandarin and English,” says Parry. “That’s been a common theme in my career: language skills have helped me progress.” Case in point: Parry was also able to land a role at the modern kaiseki restaurant RyuGin in Tokyo because its chef needed someone who could speak English.
After cutting his teeth in Asia, Parry landed at Benu and fell in love with San Francisco, where he met his wife and chose to stay. “I’ve always just moved a few years here, a few years there, but I’ve never felt more comfortable anywhere else in the world,” he told me.
Parry’s long path to Happy Crane offers an important lesson: success doesn’t happen overnight. Parry’s story would be just an interesting yarn if his food didn’t live up to the hype. Luckily, it does.
Of course, if you visit Happy Crane, you’ll want to get all the dim sum and then some. I recommend the braised beef shin, which takes inspiration from jiang niu rou, the classic cold dish you’ll find throughout Northern Chinese restaurants. The dish features thinly sliced beef shin or shank braised in a flavorful master stock that gets better and better with time.
“It’s akin to the tare in yakitori, or the mother starter in sourdough,” Parry explains. “It’s constantly being replenished.”
To make it, Parry prepares the stock with light soy, dark soy, aromatics like ginger and scallion, rock sugar for sweetness, and a mix of spices including szechuan peppercorn, star anise, and fennel seeds. The beef gets braised in the liquid for about eight hours, low and slow until tender.
When cooked through, the beef is removed and allowed to cool along with the stock before being placed back into the braising liquid and refrigerated overnight to allow the beef to reabsorb some of the potent master stock.
The next day, the beef is sliced thin in a deli slicer, plated up over a pool of master stock, topped with a spicy chile-oil vinaigrette, and dressed with thinly sliced leeks and cilantro. There are also crispy coins of thinly sliced fried lotus root for texture and a braised seasonal vegetable for an extra Californian component. On my visit it was artichokes, but Parry tells me he’s moved onto celtuce.
This dish is everything: sweet, spicy, meaty, vegetal, rich yet somehow simultaneously light and refreshing. Really, it’s all I want to eat, especially as San Francisco summer kicks in during Autumn. If you’re like me, when the dish is done and all that’s left on your plate is a pool of the potent stock, you’ll want to raise the plate directly to your lips and sip. I don’t think the restaurant offers straws, but it should.
