Have you ever experienced a meal that you haven’t tasted since your grandmother made it before she passed away years ago? This was my experience today as I returned to the famous Sam Wo restaurant for the first time in five years.
I was introduced to Sam Wo as a teenager by my best friend Vince whose parents had gone there since they were teenagers. My first time was after a night of under aged drinking in Chinatown, a place where we knew all the liquor stores would sell to us without requiring ID. It was after midnight, and I suppose someone figured it was time we got something solid into our stomachs before attempting to drive home. Don’t worry. We’d already tested our ability to drive under the influence by driving Lombard street upwards in the wrong direction. Since we didn’t hit anything, we figured we were sober enough.
We stumbled into Sam Wo’s, which stayed open until 2am serving savory American versions of Chinese dishes. Entering the restaurant was like stepping onto a submarine via the galley. You walked through the kitchen and headed up a set of stairs that were so steep it seemed more like climbing a ship ladder, flanked with handrails to pull yourself up. The ceiling on the second floor was so low that you had to stoop down to get to your table. Once seated you were assaulted by notoriously ornery waiters. It probably didn’t help that we were a bunch of drunk teenagers, and without question one of us would try to climb into the dumbwaiter before the night was through. I remember our evening ending with the waiter throwing our change on the table and exclaiming, “you go now!”
What started as a rough introduction turned into a steady tradition over the years. Vince and I both worked downtown, and we began the routine of meeting there every Friday. At some point, Fanny became our regular server. Perhaps it was because we left good tips, but she took a liking to us, and this was not something Sam Wo was known for. She usually worked on the third floor, and when we showed up, she would clear a special table for us or move someone else to another shared table. She always made sure we had a table to ourselves.
The first few times we visited, we tried different things but eventually settled on our favorites and the pretense of taking our order was soon abandoned. Fanny would sit us down and bring our regular dishes often before serving those who’d arrived before us. At times it was embarrassing as you could tell others were frustrated by the long wait for their food, and we began to feel like royalty.
That’s when we started to get what we called the “family treatment”. Food we hadn’t ordered would show up on the table. Pork rice noodle rolls in portions that could feed six. Something she called Chinese donuts, which was deep fried dough you dipped in powdered sugar. The funny thing is that none of these things ever showed up on the bill. They were just little gifts.
As you can imagine, it was a challenge to finish all the food that our new Chinese mother tried to stuff us with, and we began a practice of fasting the night before so that we could complete all that was brought to the table. Vince or I would send a reminder to the other, “don’t forget Sam Wo tomorrow.” as a warning not to eat anything after dinner that night.
At some point, even the bill began to change. We had always tipped well because we knew we were getting exceptional service, but then the bill started appearing with one of our regular dishes missing or everything at a reduced price. The lowest bill I remember was $4.25 for two appetizers, two entrees, and dessert. I think we tipped $16 that day.
This is how it continued for years until Vince and I moved away. There were other funny memories like watching tourists lather their hands in Purell before they ate, an endeavor they should have realized pointless having just walked through the kitchen. The only effective use of hand sanitizer would have been to give it to the cooks, who were chopping raw meat on a wooden butcher’s block that was probably the same surface they’d been chopping on since Vince’s parents went there.
We knew we had reached favorite status when, one year at Christmas time, Fanny handed us two gift wrapped boxes, which contained matching scarves for Vince and me. It was for this reason that when we were on a millennium cruise that same year, we made Sam Wo our port of call meal.
We wanted to be in San Francisco for the millennium. As you may recall, Y2K was the big scare, and everyone was stocking up food and hunkering down in front of their TVs for fear of being outside when society collapsed. There was no way, however, that when I was asked years in the future, “where were you at the turn of the Millennium?” that I was going to answer, “sitting on my couch watching TV”. So we booked a round trip cruise from LA to San Francisco. The idea was that the ship was a safe place to be if the city did collapse into chaos, but we could still ring in 2000 in style.
Originally, the ship was not supposed to dock in San Francisco, but when we awoke that morning, there it was, roped to the pier. We took the opportunity to walk the streets of San Francisco before the apocalypse, and that’s exactly what it felt like. There was no one on the streets. Department store windows were boarded up. We even walked straight onto the cable car at Fisherman’s wharf with not a single person in line.
It was our intention to go to Sam Wo for our last supper, and we were pleased to find it open and Fanny happily served us. At the end of the meal, she brought two red envelopes filled with cash, a Chinese new year tradition that she extended to us, just in case the world wasn’t around one month later.
We returned to the ship, and that evening, the only explosions we saw over San Francisco were the fireworks of the first day of the new millennium, while the ships horn blared over our heads for what seemed like an hour.
Sam Wo has been the most consistent routines of my life, so I was saddened to hear when the city decided to close it due to numerous building safety code violations, things that probably should have been grandfathered in on a business that was over 100 years old. My personal solution was to have everyone who walked in the door sign a waiver of risk.
Unfortunately, the city forced Sam Wo to close in 2012. It was like a family member dying, but unlike many other dead San Francisco institutions, this one would be brought back to life with the support of a community that has long made this restaurant a mainstay. It was reopened at a new location in October 2015, and I am happy to report that it is virtually unchanged. You still walk past the kitchen on your way in, and there is a cramped second floor where, to my surprise, I found my Fanny still serving tables. She smiled, cleared off a table in the otherwise packed dining area and asked me, “same same?”