Lou Bustamante

"Feel pretty good. I'm not, uh, I'm not scared at all. I just feel kind of ... feel kind of invincible." -- Jack Burton, Big Trouble in Little China

The infinite mulitverses concept was developed to mathematically reconcile both quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity, but I like to think it may help solve other baffling mysteries. Like why silver and turquoise jewelry looks so good only in the high desert state of New Mexico, why it feels right to wear loud floral shirts in Hawaii, or why spontaneously marrying someone random in Las Vegas is apparently a fun and compelling thing to do.

The answer is that all these locations are simply little portals to alternate multiverses, indistinguishable from ours save for a few small rules.

Add the Li Po Cocktail Lounge and their Chinese Mai Tai ($9, Whaler's Rum, Castillo Light Rum, Bacardi 151 Rum, "Chinese liqueur," pineapple juice) to that list of mysterious portal locations and "up is down" situations.

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Jonathan Kauffman

Clay pot rice from Utopia.

​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.

There is a particular shade of teal that I'm beginning to associate with Rice Plate Journal food shots. It's the color of the tables at Utopia Cafe, Lucky Creation, and a couple of other places I've visited. And at Utopia Cafe, just a few doors off Washington on Waverly Place, the blue-green tables stand out against lemon-yellow walls decorated with pink menus -- an Easter basket of a room.

On every one of the teal tables, from the square two-tops along the sides of the room to the large round tables at its center, there is at least one brown stoneware pot, set on a cork trivet blackened from its heat. Utopia Cafe's patrons may have ordered any number of Cantonese stir-fried dishes and stews, but they're eating them with the restaurant's specialty: clay pot rice.

There are 15 varieties, all of which take 20 minutes to cook. Cuttlefish and minced pork. Spare ribs and black beans. Chinese sausage and preserved duck. All served with a few stems of baby bok choy draped over the top and a bowl of soy sauce, which you drizzle onto the rice, tinting the white grains beige and baking onto the sides of the pot, forming a dark brown crust.

On my first trip, I try the Chinese sausage and preserved duck, their salt and fat seeping down into the rice. There are two shades of sausage covering the rice: a sweeter pink lap cheong that leaves a faint taste of anise and spice on the lips, and a darker, muskier sausage with liver's metallic edge.

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Inside Scoop just broke the news that the beloved, ancient, and wretchedly constructed Sam Wo, subject of this week's Rice Plate Journal, is closing after tomorrow night. Permanently.

4/25 UPDATE: According to Inside Scoop, the health, fire, and building departments have given Sam Wo's owners one more chance to remedy the problems that caused the restaurant to shut down. Will Sam Wo reopen? We can hope.

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Jonathan Kauffman

Sam Wo's rice-noodle roll with barbecued pork.

​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 seems strange to visit Sam Wo before midnight. In my 20s, Sam Wo was just the place you went when you had been drinking downtown and needed late-night chow fun. It's still "that place with the dumbwaiter" to tens of thousands of San Franciscans, many of whom never venture farther up the hill from Washington and Grant.

Look closely, and you get the sense that the narrow, three-story building is squashed between two other buildings, propped up between their exterior walls. You enter into the kitchen, gawk at the cooks for a few seconds, then take the steps up to the first dining room, paneled in what looks like formica, each of the tables built out of the walls and surrounded by stools. In short: dirty and adorable.

Some say Sam Wo was founded a decade before the 1906 earthquake. The place has been a magnet for non-Chinese diners since the 1950s, many of them searching out its most famous attraction, Edsel Ford Fong. As Shirley Fong-Torres wrote in The Woman Who Ate Chinatown:

Edsel ... had command of the second and third floors of the restaurant, while his brother Henry Ford Fong worked the first floor. Sam Wo's food was not its main attraction -- customers came to see and be verbally abused by Edsel. He instructed customers where to sit and what to order. He did not necessarily bring you what you ordered, which he sometimes scribbled down while smoking a cigarette. ... He was notorious for flirting with girls, rudely criticizing customers, and reminding people about tipping him.

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Jonathan Kauffman

Imperial Palace's stuffed eggplant.

​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.

All due respect to the woman who greeted us at the host podium at Imperial Palace. With her thick eyeliner, rhinestone-spangled jacket from the Michael Jackson collection, blindingly flashy rings, and multi-zippered, body-hugging pants, she belonged with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at yesterday's Hunky Jesus contest in Dolores Park. As a gay man, I was contractually obligated to be impressed.

Several seconds after she assigned us a number in line, though, she disappeared, and a man in a much less reflective suit gathered my friend and me together with three women and ushered us all to a large round table in the main dining room.

Outside the Chinese American community, Imperial Palace is better known for hosting performances of Assisted Living: The Musical and Tony & Tina's Wedding in the upstairs ballroom. The downstairs is known for budget dim sum and fading glamour: swagged curtains around the perimeter, wooden parquet aisles laid over tattered burgundy carpet, tables whose oil-spotted pink tablecloths are freshened up with white paper place mats between meals.

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Jonathan Kauffman

City View's custard buns.

SFoodie's countdown of our favorite 50 things to eat and drink, 2012 edition ​Regulars at City View know that there is a reason to make it there before the rush: The dim sum restaurant bakes a limited number of custard buns every day and runs out of them long before service is over. After noon, in fact, your chances of spotting a plate of them are iffy. But there's an upside to the restaurant's stinginess: The buns almost always come out to the table warm.

Because of its location, on the edge of Chinatown in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid, City View attracts more non-Chinese diners than New Asia or Great Eastern, and its selection is poorer because of it. But compared to the fare from Chinatown's other dim sum restaurants, City View's dumplings have more delicate skins, its vegetables a more defined crispness. And the custard buns, which look like a rare species of amanita -- well, SFoodie has been marveling over them for more than a decade.

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Jonathan Kauffman

Pho ga from San Sun.

​​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.

San Sun moved to Las Vegas its Washington Street location last fall after the city claimed the Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant's former Stockton site for the new subway station. It is hard to document the awesomeness of the new location in less than 3,000 words. So many mirrors and digital displays are mounted on the walls that I didn't know how to photograph the space. Any picture I took would turn out out looking like the funhouse scene from The Lady of Shanghai or a miniature Times Square. There are several different slide shows of menu items, and one, possibly two, basketball games.

I spent the first five minutes of my meal mesmerized by the two 36-inch digital clocks, one of which depicts the time plunging repeatedly into a clear pool of water. Then I practiced seeing how far I had to crane my neck around to spy on every other person in the restaurant (answer: less than 30 degrees). Add to that Chinese New Year cutouts, glittery granite-topped tables, gaudily painted trim, and a 200-item picture menu -- simply awe-inspiring.

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Jonathan Kauffman

Lucky Creation's spoon tofu with mushrooms.

​​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.

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Jonathan Kauffman

Red Blossom's 40-year-old Tung Ting oolong, $28/2 ounces.

​SFoodie's countdown of our favorite 50 things to eat and drink, 2012 edition ​The Bay Area's coffee roasters may get scads of national press, but our tea merchants, too, have become a force in their own realm of connoisseurship. Among them are Red Blossom Tea Company's Peter and Alice Luong, who assumed control of their parents' 35-year-old Chinatown apothecary and tea shop a decade ago. Starting in 2005, the sister and brother have redecorated and rebranded the shop (original name: Yau Hing) and taken the store online. Red Blossom's selection of teas has more than doubled, and the Luongs scout out rare and gorgeous teas from China and Taiwan, helping translate a 3,000-year tradition for American tea drinkers.

One of the most distinctive elements in Red Blossom's tea selection: aged oolongs. SFoodie has heard tell of 30-year-old pu'erhs, but SFoodie had never encountered anything like Red Blossom's 1970s-era Tung Ting oolong until visiting the shop last month. Peter Luong says that he makes a point of asking the growers and merchants he encounters on his scouting trips whether they have any old teas sitting around, and one Taiwanese tea seller responded by bringing out this tea, which had been in his possession for decades.

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Jonathan Kauffman

The $4 chicken at Mee Heong. The spare ribs are even better.

​​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.

All right, I admit it: In my survey of Chinatown, I've skipped a couple of restaurants (not to mention all the meals I've decided not to write about). And one of them was Mee Heong. Back in the beginning days of Rice Plate Journal, I poked my head into the bakery, which is dimly lit and vaguely gray in color, and spotted a bakery case stocked with a tray of buns, and two guys bent over big plates of rice. I backed out, walked down to the next restaurant on the strip, and forgot all about the bakery. More >>