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Food places and other cultural notes for the Bay Area for my visiting parents (who get tons of good Asian food where they come from):
- Rice roll express in SF Chinatown. Very good handmade cheung fan, pretty unique fillings (the special has egg and char siu and beef). My parents like this coz it’s not easy to get very high quality handmade cheung fan in Singapore
- we had Italian cakes and coffee at Stella Pastry in north beach. Sacrapanti is a delicious cake they specialize in and I really enjoy it
- They really enjoyed our visit to the Berkeley campus. They wanted me to go there when I was younger (lol) but it was just an abstract idea they had. They really liked Berkeley
- I showed them the other East bay cultural institution: Berkeley Bowl. They thought it was great but some things were worth it and some things were too expensive. I think so too!
- they were excited by Dungeness crab season and will get some today to make me a white pepper crab dish that I love
As anticipated: they really don’t accept the existence or functionality or use case of a dishwasher
They are not even capable of putting things in it lol (to be fair I only started using one a year ago too. It’s such a big cultural lift)
I needed their help with translation! I go to a Chinatown tailor for alterations.. they only really speak Toishanese. A lot of my comms happen through pointing and common words. Yesterday was ‘I lost my receipt but I have these items for collection’, which I can’t say in Toishanese. My parents speak 4 or 5 different southern Chinese languages so they helped with that. The seamstress aunties were like ‘oh we thought she’s an ABC that’s why she can’t speak to us’
For lunch, we had the chadolbaegigomtang at Seoul Gom Tang behind MacArthur BART. It is one of my favorite restaurants. The whole place feels like a tiny Korean soup restaurant in the outskirts of Seoul. It was the perfect spot on a rainy, rainy and cold day.. I thought they would say it was too expensive but they thought it was very well priced for the amount and quality of food. ‘This costs as much as it does in Seoul now’
I don’t think I’ll bother with the other things that people often associate with SF tourists and food. I know they won’t love tomato based seafood soups like cioppino or won’t find the seafood good enough quality (it’s good if you’re from a place without fresh seafood but it’s not.. my seafood-obsessed parents will like it good)
They definitely will not like SF sourdough (sour and hard breads is a very challenging thing for us. I’m better off telling them to eat a pile of rocks. That’s how much I know they’ll dislike it)
I think I’ll introduce them to southern and Latin American foods slowly.. that has a much higher chance of success due to familiarity of ingredients and spices.
We get plenty of good ‘international’ foods back in Singapore so I don’t have any special ‘French’ or ‘Italian’ spots to show them either.
They really enjoyed the civic center farmers market but were very done with citrus (due to lunar new year mandarins). So lots and lots of mandarins and pears instead
But I love crunchy sourdough crusts! Crunchy /= Rocks.
@Littlebobbytables but also the impt thing is note is there is no practice of eating bread as a main, so sandwiches etc.. not a thing. Bread for breakfast.. (other than on kaya toast on soft bread at.. not really a thing
It’s bread as a snack, so in general there is not much of a love of dense and filling breads
@skinnylatte @Littlebobbytables That's a big difference between European and Asian food culture.
There's a reason why the most-widely spread Christian prayer includes the line "Give us this day our daily bread.."
I love having a cold sandwich lunch. Prawns with rocket on wholegrain bread. 
My South Asian friends are not nearly as keen. They want it at the very least to be heated. So many panini lunches. 
@mjausson @Littlebobbytables I really struggle with food that isn’t warm. I have friends who have moved to NL or Ireland and they tell me about how they cry when they first encounter a cold breakfast and lunch.
It.. would be a struggle for me. I appreciate some things like a good Danish open face prawn sandwich, or very good cold cuts, but in general I can only deal with cold food when all of the components are extremely high quality.
Salad is another good example. I always thought I hated salad.. until I started making warm salads.
@skinnylatte @Littlebobbytables Yes, as strange as it seemed to me, cold food is an acquired taste.
OTOH many Europeans who aren't from the UK struggle with a Full English Breakfast.
I hear you on the full breakfast. When I was in Scotland/Ireland I had to give up.
@Littlebobbytables @skinnylatte It takes some getting used to, for sure.
For me a breakfast heavy on protein and slow carbs is great. I could keep going until 2 or 3 pm on a full English.
Much better than, say an American pancake breakfast. Hello 11 am sugar crash! 