Taishan Cuisine Is Keeping Chinatown’s Late-Night Food Scene Alive

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

Late-night meals in San Francisco Chinatown are a long and storied tradition going back more than 100 years — for club-hoppers, post-shift restaurant workers, hippies, Beat poets and boozehounds making one final pit stop after last call.

They’re also all but extinct.

These days, you can count on one hand the number of Chinatown restaurants open later than 9 p.m. Sam Wo, the neighborhood’s oldest and most iconic after-hours spot, recently announced it will close at the end of the year (barring an eleventh-hour miracle) — and it hasn’t been open past 8:30 since pre-pandemic times anyway. These days, if you’re craving a bowl of jook or a plate of sizzling hot beef chow fun after midnight, you’ll find more options out in the Richmond or the Sunset than you will anywhere in the vicinity of Chinatown.

It’s hard, then, to overstate the value of a place like Taishan Cuisine, which very quietly serves some of the tastiest Chinese food in San Francisco until 3 a.m. every night. Quietly, anyway, to those outside the community: Taishan is your favorite Chinese chef’s favorite Chinatown joint — a low-key cult favorite among connoisseurs of regional Chinese cuisine. And at a little before 10 o’clock on a recent Friday night, the dining room was bustling almost exclusively with Cantonese-speaking locals and only seemed to get busier the later it got.

Taishan opened in 2020, barely a month before lockdown, but it’s one of those Chinatown restaurants that looks and feels like it’s been around forever: weathered wooden tables, handwritten specials, the Hong Kong news playing on the TV. A series of red and yellow framed posters highlighting specific menu items has a vintage ’60s design aesthetic. (Each one is inscribed with a poetic Chinese idiom: A medicinal-looking pork belly hot pot dish, for instance, promises to fill men with vigor and serve as a “beauty salon” for women.) The only things that look new are the shiny, high-tech induction burners on each table, for hot pot, which feel almost anachronistic in this setting.

The restaurant has one of those wide-spanning Chinese menus that can be intimidating for a first-time visitor. There’s a whole page dedicated to hot pot and another page for dim sum. It has a rice porridge section and a noodle section, with a handful of Chinese American standbys like Mongolian beef and sweet and sour chicken mixed in.

But the restaurant’s name itself gives a clear indication of what you should order: Taishan, aka Toisan, is the part of China’s Guangdong province from which many of the earliest immigrants to California hailed during the Gold Rush, back in the 1850s — the ones who built up San Francisco’s Chinatown. In that sense, you could say that Taishanese food is Chinatown’s mother cuisine, but today, only a handful of spots in San Francisco explicitly market themselves as specializing in dishes from that region.

At Taishan Cuisine, most of these are listed as “house specials” or “chef’s specials,” and sometimes include the word “Taishan” in the name of the dish. If you stick to these, you’ll do very well for yourself. So, of course we had to order the Taishan roast chicken, which turns out to be a whole, foil-wrapped chicken with golden-brown skin that our efficient server disassembles tableside. Which is to say she rips it apart limb from limb — head, neck and all — with gloved hands until we’re left with a tidy pile of meat and bones. It comes with no sauce or seasoning dip, so we worry it might be a touch bland. But the chicken’s own juices are so flavorful, and the meat is so tender and, well, supremely chicken-y, we can’t stop eating it.

Another Taishan classic: a plate of Chinese cauliflower (skinnier and more pleasantly crunchy than Western varietals), which comes studded with garlic and tossed with thick slices of preserved sausage until it’s slicked with pork fat and salty juices. It’s one of the most delicious and addicting vegetable stir-fries I’ve eaten in a while.

Taishanese food is probably best known for its claypot rice dishes, the most famous being yellow eel claypot rice. At Taishan Cuisine, it’s the biggest splurge on the menu at $48, but the portion is big enough to feed four people easily. It’s hard to describe how fragrant this pot of rice was when our server lifted up the lid. Again, there isn’t much seasoning to speak of — just a bit of soy sauce mixed with rendered eel fat to coat each glistening grain of rice. The eel itself, shredded into small chunks, tastes akin to a mild catfish — mild enough that you can order the dish as a fine and luxurious substitute for white rice, to accompany the rest of your meal. And the best part? The toasty, crunchy, utterly glorious crust that forms at the bottom of the pot.

If we hadn’t already, in typical fashion, ordered way too much food for two people, we would have loved to try the Taishan-style braised goose or cleansed our palate with the cloudy beef bone soup we saw on several other tables around us. As it was, I felt like we’d barely scratched the surface of what the restaurant, and the cuisine, had to offer.

For the last few weeks, then, this is the meal I keep thinking about. When the hunger pangs strike past midnight, I start daydreaming about claypot rice — and, maybe, for a return to a time when all of Chinatown is lit up late into the night with jook shops and noodle houses and stylish Hong Kong–style cafes. For now, it’ll have to be enough to plan my next meal at Taishan Cuisine. As long as they’re around, Chinatown’s late-night food scene isn’t dead yet.

Taishan Cuisine is open 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.–3 a.m. daily at 781 Broadway in San Francisco.