As long as I'm thinking about restaurants, here's an ethnic twofer in the Mission.

By Julie Zigoris Published Feb. 28, 2024 • 12:00pm - The San Francisco Standard

Fusing the old with new at San Francisco’s best—and newly expanded—Iranian restaurant

Chef Hanif Sadr fuses old-world style with new-world research in his cooking. It’s an approach that makes the expansion of his Iranian restaurant in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights feel both familiar and novel, comforting and unexpected. 

Warm wood, earthen jugs and colorful pottery set the tone at Komaaj Mazze Bar on 29th Street, where a loud and lively ambience—and an Iranian grandmother’s answer to soul food—greet a consistently packed house of customers. Sadr, a trained engineer who considers himself more of a researcher than a chef, approaches his dishes with humility. 

“I’m a self-taught cook,” he said. “I don’t want to be that kind of chef-y chef-y person.”

Sadr doesn’t want a fancy vibe at Komaaj. Dishes are prepared using the principles of Iranian traditional medicine, which he likens to Indian and Chinese philosophies, with foods that are either “hot” or “cold.” The ultimate goal of any recipe is to balance these two opposites. 

Ingredients like yogurt, cheese and pomegranates are cold, whereas nuts and spices are hot. That’s why you’ll see pomegranate-walnut stew, yogurt sprinkled with sumac or dried mint and cheese decorated with nigella seeds.  

This approach is perhaps why the recipes at Komaaj feel so healing to eat. They are bright but balanced. You can eat your fill but never feel overfull. “We look at ingredients from a medicinal angle,” Sadr said. “As a treatment for the body or mind.”

Fusing the old with new at San Franciso’s best—and newly expanded—Iranian restaurant

AND

This is where Blowfish Sushi used to be.

By Tejal Rao

July 18, 2022 - NY Times

Take a Korean Barbecue Master Class at San Ho Won

SAN FRANCISCO — Twenty years into running his restaurant in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, Yening Liang had a sudden moment of revelation.

It wasn’t enough, he realized, for the menus at Hop Woo to translate dishes like barbecue pork and roast duck from Cantonese into English. If he wanted the city’s Mexican, Central American and other Latino communities to feel welcome, he should include Spanish as well. When Mr. Liang, who was known as Lupe, died in May, his inclusive approach to menu writing became part of his legacy.

A menu can suggest an invitation, a blandishment, an obsession, but it’s never a mere catalog of what’s for dinner. Like any form of writing, it reveals countless small but significant decisions — what to expand and compress, what to blow up or evade, whom to address or freeze out, and how to direct a reader’s attention for the few, precious moments you might have it.

At San Ho Won, a Korean barbecue restaurant that Jeong-In Hwang and Corey Lee opened last November in San Francisco, the menu uses a combination of Korean characters, English transliteration and translation. A QR code acts as a footnote on the page, directing you to a glossary.

Some entries are quick synopses, like the one for jook: “rice porridge.” Others are finer-grained. An entry for jebi churi builds on the definition of the cut in Korean butchery, a slim piece of beef that “stretches from the upper rib to the neck” and, when viewed from a particular angle or sliced across, “resembles a swallow (jebi) in flight.”

If you didn’t know this before, jebi churi may now seem the only acceptable way to describe it — the name of the thing inextricable from its shape. And now that the lights are on, its English translation, “beef neck filet” does seem pretty clumsy, doesn’t it?

Take a Korean Barbecue Master Class at San Ho Won

Greg