This Classic Oakland Chinatown Restaurant Hits the Spot at 3 a.m.

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.

Even in the days when everyone would complain about how nothing in Oakland was open past midnight (which is to say, literally the entire time I lived in Oakland), there was always New Gold Medal — the one no-frills Cantonese spot in Chinatown where you could get a steaming-hot plate of beef chow fun or a bowl of wonton soup until 3 o’clock in the morning.

How many of us have rolled in through those doors, slightly hammered, with a crew seven or eight deep after the bars and clubs let out, or solo after getting off a late work shift, or halfway through an all-night study session? If you live in the East Bay and have ever gotten extremely, extremely hungry in the middle of the night these past two decades, it’s even odds that New Gold Medal has saved your life at least once or twice. (Going even further back, Sun Hong Kong held court at the same 8th Street location, with a similar menu and late-night hours, starting in the ’80s.)

The good news is that New Gold Medal is still around, still open until 3 a.m. It still sits in the same classic Chinatown building with the tall, narrow windows and glazed tile eaves — still has the same picturesque tableau of glistening, well-bronzed ducks hanging in the window above a fat stack of fried dough sticks.

Most importantly? The food is just as good as it ever was and still hits perfectly when eaten at or around midnight.

Admittedly, some things have changed. For one, at least during our visit at around 11 o’clock on a weeknight, the crowd was a lot more subdued than I remember — less party time and more tired gig workers enjoying a late dinner before going home to crash for the night. If anything, this made for even more satisfying people-watching: There was an older Cantonese family — a lady with a walker hunched over a bowl of soup, a severe-looking gentleman with a black sport coat and tidy, slicked-back hair. The whole group of them looked like they’d be stone-cold killers at the mahjong table. In the corner, a middle-aged South Asian guy had ordered two dishes and a tureen of soup all for himself and was absolutely going to town.

Another change: I regret to inform you that the days of the $6.50 rice plate and $16 whole roast duck — staples of my 2010s initiation as an NGM devotee — are long gone. The prices have gone up here just like they have everywhere in the Bay, so these days most items on the menu will run you $15 to $20. But the portions are still as generous as they ever were, so the upshot is that you can drop about $60 on three dishes and a big tub of rice, eat until you’re stuffed, and go home happy and full, with plenty of leftovers for lunch the next day. Not exactly something to complain about.

New Gold Medal isn’t the kind of destination restaurant that has some rare specialty dish it’s famous for. But if you like homey Cantonese food, its vast menu covers all of the standards — and does almost all of them exceptionally well. It might be best known for its Cantonese-style barbecue, and on a good day, the crispy-skinned roast pork is as tasty as any version you can find in the East Bay. It can be hit or miss, though — and if you’re coming late at night, chances are, the only cuts left in the case will be sad and dry. We went instead with the duck, which is reliably juicy and succulent at all hours, roasted slowly until the fat renders down to a particularly luscious texture. I have to stop myself from eating half a bird all by myself.

On this visit, we also devoured a plate of the Gold Medal chow mein, a crispy nest of fried noodles topped with a slurry of assorted meats, seafood and enough bok choy and shiitake mushrooms to make you feel like you got your meal’s worth of veggies. The salt-and-pepper fried pork chops came out tremendously hot and crispy, sprinkled with sliced garlic and jalapeños, and cut into hefty pieces that were super satisfying to gnaw off the bone.

But it almost doesn’t matter what you order. Every regular has their own favorites, running the gamut from war wonton soup to the assortment of clay pot rice dishes and stir-fried noodles. My own personal favorite is the stir-fried shrimp and eggs, a dish I’ve ordered at at least a dozen other restaurants in the Bay. But the scallion-flecked eggs never come out as light and fluffy as they do here — slippery enough to make the dish all the more comforting when you scoop it up over a big bowl of white rice. For me, no trip to New Gold Medal is complete without this dish.

Meanwhile, a couple of middle-aged ladies who’ve been at the restaurant forever run the place with efficiency and good humor, cracking jokes with regulars — equally adept, it seems, in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and probably several other dialects I’m not aware of.

These days, all we hear about is how the Bay Area’s Chinatowns are dying, and how Oakland Chinatown, in particular, was killed off by the COVID era and its aftermath. All the more reason to celebrate the survivors, then — to give thanks that even now, you can stumble into New Gold Medal at 3 a.m. and eat probably the best meal you’ll eat all week.

New Gold Medal is open 9 a.m.–3 a.m. daily except for Tuesdays, when it closes at midnight. The restaurant is located at 389 8th St. in Oakland.