This is sad.
San Francisco’s legendary Sam Wo restaurant (which I’ve written about before and which was home to the “world’s rudest, worst, most insulting waiter” — the famed Edsel Ford Fong) is closing.
It’s 106 years old and the main reason it is being closed is because it would cost too much to bring it up to today’s codes.
…bringing the rickety, three-story building into this century will be costly.
“My understanding is that a lot of the violations require a large infusion of money to fix,” Shields said. “They’re major fixes – everything from venting to plumbing to electrical all need to be upgraded.”
Well, it it would be very costly, if not impossible. Take a look at the front of the place . It’s a skinny, charming little building that contains the entire restaurant:
If you want to eat there, you have to go through the front door and then walk through the kitchen to a tiny stairway —
— which goes to the second floor:
And if there isn’t room on the second floor, there’s another tiny stairway which goes to the third floor.
And if you’re lucky, you might even be able to order from the menu with such ridiculously low prices you’ll wonder how that ever came to be allowed in San Francisco.
That is, of course, if they had even let you use the menu:
A Chinatown institution for over 100 years, Sam Wo’s is a ramshackle speakeasy of a restaurant where you are more likely to get yelled at and berated rather than unctuously served. As you walk directly into the kitchen, a waiter yells at you, already exasperated, to come up the rickety stairs to the meager dining area. Saw Wo’s was the home of the legendary Edsel Ford Fong until he passed away recently–this surly, rude “waiter” would treat you like a recruit at his own private Chinese restaurant boot camp. The tradition continues: you are most likely told what to eat, instead of choosing the food yourself–but its eternal redeeming quality is the fact that Sam Wo’s is some cheap, cheap eats.
It’s all part of its charm, and if you’re not charmed by walking through a grimy kitchen to get to a tiny rickety stairway you actually have to climb, and then be told rudely what to order, then clearly it isn’t the restaurant for you! By all means, don’t go there!
Must everything have to be modern and standardized? Why are restaurants being forced into compliance with codes written with giant chains in mind?
I can just hear the insufferable activists in that once interesting city now run by tasteless apparatchiks who wage war against charm…
“There’s no wheelchair access!”
BAD BAD BAD!
I say fuck the codes. Bring back the world’s rudest waiter, Edsel Ford Fong!
He’d know how to put things into their proper perspective.
Comments
9 responses to “Tale of Wo”
Me and my girlfriend Christine ate in a similar place back in the day. As we walked up the stairwell the vibes got worse and worse. Then we got to the restaurant and after a wait got seated. Lots of Chinese in the place. No whites – other than us.
And funny thing. Lots of men in the place rubbing the lapels of their suits. And men showing up who did not come up the front stairs.
We figured out after we had left that we had wandered into an opium den.
Oh. Yeah. The service was rude and terrible. The food excellent.
Oh god yes! Edsel! I used to go there all the time just to get served by him. He was a great man! Chow fun duck pretty good too.
And San Francisco is closing it? Just one more reason to nuke the city from orbit and kill everything in the zone. Some innocents, sure, but the virus is deadly and will spread.
Used to eat there as a college student, when “cheap” was the operative term. It was completely as described!
Jesus. Joking or not, Vanderleun, you’re crazy. Yeah, SF and lefty cities in general do have this fetish for overregulation, but the market will take care of that. A tax discourages the thing taxed and a burdensome regulation discourages the thing regulated, and they’ll just go away. As will people who dislike that kind of ordnung-worshiping.
I have eaten there a number of times some four decades ago. I don’t recall the waiter as being rude. Perhaps he reminded me of Noo Yawk: brusque and to the point. He wanted your order, and got it. No small talk, just take the order and deliver it. As fast as possible. I’ll take “rude” and fast over nice and slow. Any day.
Tasty, inexpensive food.
Sorry to hear it’s going. One more example of the decades long self-destructiveness of the City.
I’m delighted to see people liked this! (I wouldn’t worry about Gerard’s deadly serious “threat” to nuke The City, though. Everyone knows SF is a nuclear free zone, so it would never work!)
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