Crude Drugs Chicken Feet: Best Chicken Feet Ever?

Photos by W. Blake Gray

"Crude Drugs Chicken Feet"

​We admit that we ordered Crude Drugs Chicken Feet as a joke. Was the joke on us? They turned out to be the best chicken feet we've ever had.

​And it made Golden Gate Dim Sum Seafood Restaurant feel like quite the find. We ran "best dim sum" through Yelp's search engine and this restaurant came up 49th in San Francisco, which just goes to show how undiscerning Yelp is, but of course we knew that.

While we wouldn't bring our Aunt Myrtle here, Golden Gate is a fine, cheap, second-tier place to bring dim sum veterans or friends who are new to the whole experience.

Steamed Shanghai dumplings

​The restaurant has an interesting feel, with two very different rooms. In the front, the wood floors, walls, and ceiling could easily be redone into an Alaskan-theme lodge. The fishtank is quite clean for this price class and the fish look lively, which is reassuring.

​In the back, there's a more spacious room with a huge picture window looking out on a garden. It's impossible to tell from the drab exterior just how comfortable the place is inside.

Unusually for its price class, Golden Gate is very English speaker-friendly. There's a photo menu of the classic dim sum dishes; great for newbies. And yet the great majority of diners appear Chinese-American.

Now about those chicken feet. They're pricey, at $4.50, but we decided that was a small amount to pay to experience Crude Drugs. (Yes, we know it says "medicinal herbs" in Chinese. Doesn't really sound much tastier, does it?)

We can't claim to be a chicken feet expert. Most people we eat dim sum with don't like them, so when we order them, even when we like them, we usually gnaw off the cartilage and skin from a few and leave as much as half untouched.

This was the first time we ever ate not only every foot, but drank every drop of soup. Crude Drugs Chicken Feet is outstanding! The skin absorbs the herbs, and there's something about the semifatty feel of the meat that makes it actually feel like eating solid chicken soup. We couldn't persuade our wife to have a foot, even though she says the collagen is supposed to be good for the skin (we're going to be beau-tiful!) but she agreed that the soup was superb. We will go back to Golden Gate just for this dish.

​We also liked the house steamed shrimp dumpling ($2.50), simple but solid, with an appealing moistness to the wrapper. The steamed Shanghai dumplings ($2.50) don't really have soup, but they are meaty, aromatic, and tasty. The sticky rice with lotus leaf ($3) was also solid; we liked the Cantonese sausage slice.

Our success with the chicken feet led us to order chicken bun ($2.50) and we were rewarded with a fluffy bun with plenty of green onion and mushroom along with the chicken. Normally we think chicken buns are for people who don't eat pork, but here they're a good choice for anyone.

Misses included clams in black bean sauce ($4.50), which had too much green pepper, the veggie Chinese restaurants overuse when they're trying to cut ingredient costs; and steamed sweet cake ($2), which smelled fabulous (this place clearly cares about aromas) but was disappointingly dry.

We wandered in at about 12:15 p.m. on a Sunday and got a table without a problem, but when we left, people were milling around outside. Golden Gate Dim Sum is in a quiet area of Clement Street, with few neighboring restaurants, so we assume this was not spillover business; people choose to come here. As we left, we gave some advice to a Caucasian couple (the only ones we saw in the crowd) that we're about to give you: "Get the chicken feet."

Golden Gate Dim Sum Seafood Restaurant
1829 Clement (at 19th Ave.), 666-3883