When the venerable Chinatown restaurant Sam Wo reopened in 2015 after a three-year-long closure, San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer gave it a warm welcome back, albeit with one quibble: “Those in the know can see this is a sanitized, spruced-up version,” he wrote.
A decade later, I was just lucky enough to grab the last available table when I visited Sam Wo on Thursday night for my last meal there. My partner and I had dodged the usual dinner line, but our table happened to be unceremonially jammed between the bathroom door and a tiny staircase to the second floor. I chuckled when I put my hand down on the tabletop and felt an unseen stickiness that would not wipe off — I had found the “layers of grease” Bauer wanted to see so badly.
Sam Wo is a Chinatown institution: Opened sometime around 1912, the restaurant fed generations of immigrants and tourists at its original location at 813 Washington St. Mounting health and safety code violations in the aging structure, however, forced a closure in 2012. It was resurrected at 713 Clay St. in 2015, to the cheers of community acolytes.
Nothing good lasts forever, even after a triumphant comeback. Sam Wo’s final dinner service will be on Sunday, Jan. 26, but it has nothing to do with code violations. Instead, head chef and co-owner David Ho, who has worked behind the stove since taking over from his grandfather in 1986, is retiring. His business partners, Steven Lee and Jonathan Leong, are now seeking somebody who can succeed him.
“It’s been crazy. Every bit of merchandise we have is gone. The restaurant has been busy, too. I think they did almost $10,000 on Saturday night,” Lee told me.
He uses the word “legacy” a lot when he talks about Sam Wo, which is the Romanized spelling of a Cantonese word that translates to “three harmonies.” Lee, a nightclub owner and former city entertainment commissioner, fondly recalls going out to eat dinner there in the middle of the night after club hours. Yet the gravity of Sam Wo’s history didn’t dawn on him until the Chronicle announced its closure in 2012.
“I thought, ‘Oh, it’s just another Chinese joint shutting down.’ But what amazed me was that Sam Wo suddenly had a line around the block for days, from morning until 3 a.m.,” Lee said. “I didn’t visit Chinatown that much because most of my work was in SoMa. I didn’t realize the legacy it had until I saw it for myself.”
Lee and Leong worked together with Ho to reopen in 2015, after years of location-hunting, fights with shady landlords, and some $800,000 in renovations. They assembled a group of investors to buy in, and then spent another $20,000 to trademark the Sam Wo name.
Despite the headaches and fat bills, the return was a success: The ownership group made back its investment in three years, Lee said.
“Sam Wo, because of the name, always has customers. We have a strong base,” he continued. “That’s why we want a brick-and-mortar in Chinatown. If we lose that storefront, Chinatown has lost another tourist attraction.”
On Thursday, the restaurant hummed with the noise of happy diners, and I overheard more than one table weaving laments of Sam Wo’s closure with memories of their visits there. Most of the diners were not Chinese, but they didn’t seem like tourists, either.
Every table had an order of the restaurant’s famous char siu rice rolls, which arrive pre-sliced into chubby bites stuffed with barbecued pork. These are not the piping-hot, silken rice rolls you might find at, say, Steam Rice Roll King in the Sunset. The version at Sam Wo’s has a much more dense layer of rice noodle, making for a heftier dish with a satisfying chew. The best part is watching everyone dip their rice roll into the restaurant’s infamously sinus-clearing hot mustard — you know it’s hitting when the noses scrunch up.
I also got an order of the house chow fun, and a fragrant plate of Chinese broccoli stir-fried with garlic and oyster sauce. The most important thing about any dish stir-fried in a wok is the hei, or “breath,” of the flame as it touches the food. Both dishes passed the test, showing off the trademark char and smoky aroma in each bite. While we’d ordered plenty of food for two, I grew a little envious of the wonton soup and jook, or rice porridge, steaming away on a neighboring table.
Earlier that day, I met with David Ho (no relation to the chef), a longtime community organizer in Chinatown who has led political campaigns and now works with the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce. As we sat at a booth in iCafe Bakery, nibbling on egg tarts and sipping milk tea, Ho ruminated on the long arc of Chinatown’s success in San Francisco — and what the next chapter holds for a legendary neighborhood in evolution.
“Sam Wo is the last of its kind. It’s unique. The food is unfamiliar to Chinese people now,” Ho said with a chuckle, referring to its heavily Americanized offerings. “It’s a style of food that was very prevalent, but it slowly disappeared. It has a lot to do with the generation born in the 1950s. That’s what they grew up with here.”
The Chinese food revolution in the Bay Area started with initial migration in the 1800s, but the true “golden days” of Chinese restaurant cooking were in the 1980s and ‘90s, Ho told me. An immigration boom brought highly trained chefs from Hong Kong and southern China to San Francisco, where they thrilled diners with regional dishes, masterful dim sum, and eye-popping banquets with hundreds of diners at a time. Tourism was booming, and so were Chinatown families, along with the community organizations, churches, and nonprofits that served them.
It’s not just old-school American Chinese joints like Sam Wo that are disappearing, but also the master chefs and artisans with knowledge passed down through generations, Ho said. He misses Hong Kong-style bakeries (“Most of them are gone from the city, or the quality has gone down”) as well as the affordable dim sum halls that he frequented with his great-grandmother in the ‘90s.
“The mom-and-pop, handmade, deeply cultural skills are being lost,” he said.
Sam Wo isn’t a grand old banquet hall, nor does anyone expect it to serve a high level of cuisine — but it is a four-decade labor of love for Chef Ho. Lee is on the hunt for a new operator, one who can bring fresh blood and energy to the venerable institution, without straying far from the formula. He spent all of 2024 looking for the right fit, and claims that there are a few potential buyers at the moment.
“I don’t want a shitty reputation by selling it to the wrong person,” Lee told me bluntly. “I would rather find a way to carry on the Sam Wo name in a different way. Maybe we sell merchandise, and our famous hot mustard. Maybe we can distribute through Costco. But the very best route is to keep our presence in Chinatown.”
If they do find the right chef-operator, Sam Wo would reopen in March at the earliest. If they don’t, the landlord has offered them three more months at 50% of the usual monthly rent while they continue the search, Lee said. After that, the owners will auction off the restaurant for its parts, while keeping the trademark for other uses.
I thought about that potential outcome at dinner, while staring at a framed old apron complete with clip-on bow-tie: The uniform of one Edsel Ford Fung, deemed by the legendary writer Herb Caen to be the most “rude” waiter in America.
Fung, who died in 1984, would’ve been an absolute star on social media these days for the surrealistic tantrums and verbal assaults he levied on his customers at Sam Wo. I can imagine him thump-thump-thumping up and down those tiny wooden steps to the cramped upper dining room, switching between ripples of Cantonese and insults in English.
There are so many bits of similar memorabilia in Sam Wo: Photos and receipts, faded certificates and autographs, all tributes to a style of sepia-toned Chinese American food that is fading from SF’s dining scene.
I felt a swell of emotion when I read Chef Ho’s words in a Chronicle story on Thursday evening, after dinner. He never wanted his two adult kids to take over a Chinese restaurant, he told the paper, and now dreams of retiring in Guangzhou with a little bit of free time.
Despite my romanticism of Sam Wo and its legacy, I hope that he’s able to live the rest of his life peacefully, without a single 12-hour shift.
