On schedule for once, here is my second meal report from our brief visit to San Francisco in mid-June. We’d arrived the previous evening (when we had dinner at State Bird Provisions). Our first full day started in Berkeley, on the campus of UC Berkeley, to be exact, walking the missus’ undergraduate haunts with the boys. From there we returned to San Francisco for lunch. Dim sum was what we were after. The best dim sum in the Bay Area is said to be in the suburbs, not in San Francisco proper but it seemed unlikely we’d be driving to the suburbs just to eat. Luckily, there’s very good dim sum in the city as well and if you ask for recommendations from local foodies, the venerable Yank Sing is likely to be on most people’s lists. There are two locations; we went to the one on Spear St., in the Rincon Center. Here’s how it went.

As we were driving, it was a bit of a trial to get there. I’m not referring to traffic in general—which was really not too bad coming from Berkeley in the middle of a weekday—but to getting to the restaurant itself. Google Maps does not take you to the entrance to the parking, you see. We ended up calling the restaurant and getting directions to that entrance. And then the real nightmare began. Let’s just say that the Rincon Center parking lot is not designed for anything but very small cars. We were not in one. It was very difficult to negotiate the turns in the parking lot without grazing parked cars, leave alone to actually get into a parking spot once we found one without causing damage. I consider this (and also getting out without incident) one of my life’s great achievements.

From the parking we took the elevator up to the restaurant where we had reservations. I’m not sure if we needed them as the restaurant was not full but it certainly was quite busy. We were seated at a four-top and quickly got ready for action. Almost immediately we hit two snags. The first is that our older boy began to feel the early signs of a transient case of food poisoning. We suspect this was due to a poor breakfast choice in a cafe in Berkeley; it was to hold him out completely from a spectacular Indian dinner that night and it also unfortunately meant he was unable to enjoy much of this meal.

The other snag was external to our digestive systems. The host who sat us down gave us a menu and left. The menu is divided into two broad sections, one of which has the heading “Please Order With Server”. As there were carts circulating in the dining room, we took this to mean that everything else on the dim sum menu was to be received from the carts as they came to our table. The issue here is that very few carts came to our end of the dining room and there were long periods of sitting without food hoping that a cart with something new would show up. I was told later on a food forum that it is possible to order the dim sum items directly from the menu as well. It would have been nice if our host had clarified that when we sat down.

At any rate, we did manage to eat a decent amount, even if it was not as much as we would have if we had known to just place orders directly with the server, and if one quarter of the group hadn’t taken up permanent residence in the restroom ten minutes into the meal for fear of having to throw up. The other issue, thanks to our misunderstanding of the ordering system, is that a lot of what we got from the carts was not in their optimal state from having gone around the dining room a lot before coming to our table. Of course, the quality was still worlds above what is available in the Twin Cities but it is likely we did not see the best of what Yank Sing can do. I wouldn’t say that what we ate was at the level of the top places in the San Gabriel Valley outside L.A, and it was certainly well short of Tim Ho Wan in Seoul in March.

To see what it is we did eat, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next, from San Francisco and from the Twin Cities.

With two ginger beers, tax, tip and a $4 parking fee, the total came to just over $120. Considering you can pay more in the Twin Cities for far inferior dim sum, that is pretty good value for San Francisco. I would not be opposed to coming back on a future trip to see what the dim sum is like when ordered directly from the kitchen but if we do, we’ll take a cab and pass on the parking drama!

Alright, my next San Francisco report will be of the fantastic Indian dinner three of us ate that night. I hope to get that out on Saturday. The next Twin Cities report will be of a recent Mexican lunch at Homi in St. Paul.