Ha! You’ve got to start small 
I believe Hakka restaurant in the Richmond district has more Hakka dishes than the other places I listed in the original post , including those dishes you mentioned and others.
Somehow “Hakka” and “regional” don’t go together.
Yeah. I didn’t notice a Hakka section before. That’s how there is a hodgepodge of restaurants under that section geographically speaking. I wonder if the chefs/ owners who open Hakka restaurants are Hakkas themselves.
-
Dim Sum USA (Foster City) Beijing “dim sum”, XLB (including a veggie XLB!), takeout or frozen, bao, bing, roujiamo
-
Little Lamb Hot Pot & BBQ (San Jose) Inner Mongolia hot pot chain, with over 600 locations in China and throughout the world
Famous Bao at 2431-A Durant, Berkeley (in the Shaanxi / Xi’an group) has recently opened a second location a few days ago at 2116 Shattuck in downtown Berkeley and according to the Daily Cal,
…
The second location’s menu will feature popular items from the Sather Lane location, but it will also include several new additions, such as hot pot and Chinese barbecue, according to [owner Frances] Sun. The downtown location will also serve alcohol, he added.
“We will be offering about three very authentic hot pot dishes: one of them is a spicy hot pot using peppercorns from Sichuan shipped directly for us,” Sun said. “We will also be serving a Beijing-style lamb stew hot pot; you may not find it anywhere else in the Bay Area.”
…
1 Like
Closed:
- Ai Noodle
- Shanghai Mama
- Curry’s 'N More
Closed
- Shanghai Dumpling (Cupertino) damn, I considered them among the top SFBA XLB
- Porridge House (Newark)
Oh no! Shanghai Dumpling was our go-to in the S. Bay for Yan Du Xian (Shanghai pork soup with bamboo and tofu) and sjb. Reports on Yelp! say they are reopening on April 15th, refocusing on South Asian cuisine, but keeping the xlb on the menu. Any decent replacements?
@KK has now opened a restaurant in Pittsburg- K K Cafe.
OK. I am kidding about the @KK part, not kidding about the actual restaurant opening.
1 Like
Though I was never too fond of the sunset location (preferred the Chinatown and San Mateo locations though… well… Chinatown’s location is also gone) it looks like ABC Cafe on Noriega is no more.
At least Tak Kee Lee keeps on chugging diagonally from this location.
- Bamboo Garden (Mountain View) has closed. A yelper says that owner Kathleen Guo also owns XLB Kitchen in Cupertino.
-
Nash Kitchen & Cafe (四海小馆 which I think translates to Four Seas Pavillion?) opened in April on University Ave in Berkeley, near Shattuck. They have Chinese street foods and skewers (shao kao), some Hankow (Wuhan) dishes. The area near Cal’s campus has certainly changed over the past 10 years, no doubt influenced by the five fold increase in international students from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan— Sheng Kee, 85 degrees, Happy Lemon, Chengdu Style, two Famous Baos, hot pot and tea places, etc.
-
Wild Ginger (Alameda) now has Biang Biang noodles, and a five or six different preparations that use it. I neglected to take a photo— they’re listed on a black board, but not the actual menu (or online one).
Five fold? Wow. Cal’s budget must be in real bad shape then. I lived a block from Bonchon for a few years in the early 2000’s. Chinese food was fairly slim pickings back then. I still remember my meals from Sun Hong Kong.
Yup, 2,549 of those students are enrolled in Fall 2017 (2,279 from mainland China).
@chandavkl has written about student influences several times, notable in a 2014 post about college towns. What also motivated me to look up that number was the March edition of the Sinica podcast on the Chinese student experience. which said the US in general has had a five fold increase in Chinese international students.
When I stopped working in Berkeley in 2012, there was of course Great China and Mandarin something on Shattuck started offering Sichuan dishes to appeal to the influx of students. Nothing else remarkable (I like Chengdu Style, but can’t confirm whether new non-chain places are notable beyond student budget food)
Thanks for the headcount. Nationally, Mainland Chinese students in US colleges roughly doubled between 2005 and 2010 and then doubled again from 2010 to 2015. Current figure is somewhere around 300,000. I’m a little surprised Cal’s number isn’t higher since Illinois and USC are both over 5,000. However 2,500 Mainland students plus thousands more Asian Americans can support a good number of Chinese restaurants. Not sure how many Chinese students it takes to support an authentic Chinese restaurant, but I’d guess it’s in the low hundreds. Also, Cal is like UCLA and USC in that initially there wasn’t quite the need for Chinese food sources due to the existing large Chinese population in the metro area. It’s only been a couple years or so since authentic Chinese restaurants have opened up proximate to the UCLA and USC campuses.
1 Like
Interesting there’s a new Sichuan restaurant named Yiping. The Chinese names of both Spicy Queen and Spicy King are both “Mala Yiping.”
1 Like
Cultural exchange is a two-way street, and Berkeley’s gain may be China’s loss.
If the hot dog logo on the restaurant I found in 2006 at People’s Square in Shanghai looks familiar, it’s because it was founded by a former foreign student at Cal.
5 Likes
There’s a Yiping in Berkeley? Do you know its address? Yiping in San Ramon has been open for several years and is unrelated to Spicy Queen, but both have owners from Chongqing. Is that a coincidence, or is there some idiomatic/cultural reference I’m missing? I understand that Yiping 一品 means “first rate”, but can also refer to a chafing dish.
Other than being the cheaper of the two public schools, I don’t know how to I explain the disparity between UC Berkeley and Urbana Champaign. Both have big fees for out of state and international students.
Perhaps the overflow from UCBerkeley are going to UC Davis—- it enrolled 68 mainland China students in 2009, and almost 2000 in 2015! http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article160029439.html I found the lack of international students there alarming when I was a grad student. Times have changed.
No, I meant the one you mentioned in a previous post - San Ramon. I assumed (mistakenly) that it was new.
1 Like
