Hunan Home's Food Is San Francisco Hunan

Jonathan Kauffman

Hunan Home's smoked pork with cabbage. Is that brown rice on the plate? Oh, yes it is.

​​Rice Plate Journal is a yearlong project to canvass Chinatown, block by block, discovering the good, the bad, and the hopelessly mediocre. Maximum entrée price: $10.

It took me only a few seconds after sitting down at Hunan Home's to read the signs: Chinese zodiac place mats. Free hot-and-sour soup and egg roll with lunch. More non-Chinese faces at the tables than Chinese. We weren't in a Hunan restaurant, so to speak -- we were in a San Francisco Hunan restaurant.

Hunan cooking first entered mainstream American consciousness almost 50 years ago, when a generation of master chefs who'd left China after the revolution emigrated to the United States. In New York, according to restaurateur Ed Schoenfeld, the first Hunan and Sichuan restaurants began appearing in the mid-1960s. A few were awarded four stars in the New York Times, and their popularity exploded. The rise of General Tso's chicken, named after a famous Hunanese hero, began.

"The Hunan craze in SF hit in 1976," says Full Noodle Frontity's Gary Soup, "with Tony Hiss' rave review in The New Yorker of the original Hunan Restaurant on Kearny Street." Hunan Home's, like Henry's Hunan and dozens of other Bay Area restaurants, dates back to that period, and spicy regional Chinese dishes soon became absorbed into Chinese American cuisine. Now, seeing "Hunan" on a restaurant sign means much the same thing as "Mandarin" -- food tailored to the American palate, albeit with a few more chiles.

Ed U./Yelp

The interior of Hunan Home's.

​Rice Plate Journal is hitting the eastern fringe of Chinatown, one of two zones in the neighborhood in which Chinese American food overtakes Cantonese. But what's wrong with eating Chinese American food in the city with the oldest Chinese American community? I celebrated with an order of potstickers. As far as potstickers go, HH's were good, with skins so thin they resembled Japanese gyoza and the flickering aroma of ginger in the meat-cabbage filling. The hot and sour soup was, well, hot and sour, with not enough deviation from the norm to remark on.

Hunan Home's regular menu is a blend of dishes designed for Cantonese tastes -- dry scallop soup with shredded chicken and bamboo shoots, clams with black bean sauce -- and more American dishes like chicken deep-fried and glazed with an sweet, hot orange-peel sauce.

My guest and I settled on a couple of dishes that seemed to hit the middle ground: fish filets stir-fried with zucchini and basil in a clear sauce -- a little thin on flavor, but with a good snap left to the squash, and delicately cooked meat -- as well as one of the menu's few dishes labeled Hunan: smoked pork with cabbage. Smoked and cured meats are one of the dominant characteristics of the province's food. Smoked to the level of a good Virginia ham, the pork was coated with a little hot-bean sauce and garlic and stir-fried with cabbage that softened up enough to absorb some of the meat's flavor. Chinese Hunan? San Francisco Hunan? We finished the plate without feeling the need to make the distinction.