Dim sum in my hood

Since the start of the year, we've entertained a fairly constant stream of house guests. We've essentially been running a non-profit B&B out of our apartment. We have become expert hosts and tour guides and towel-washers. Don't we need some sort of license for this?

Really, though, I'm not complaining. I've had some amazing times with our guests. They force us to get out in the city and see it through fresh eyes and remember why it is that we chose to pay double the rent that we paid in Chicago to be here. Plus, I'm happy to live in a place that friends and family actually want to visit.

Guests demand Experiences when they come to visit, and the word on the street is that dim sum is a quintessential San Francisco Experience. I'm not quite sure why San Fran gets dibs, since I've had it plenty of times in every other city I've lived in, but who am I to argue? When our loved ones come to town, I have learned not to suggest oysters (nobody likes them except me) or Zuni (sorta pricey) or Rice-a-Roni (nobody finds that funny at all). Instead I take them out for dim sum. It's cheap, it's fast, it's local to our hood, it's breakfast and lunch together, and it leaves my guests too queasy and greasy to obsess over the other San Francisco Touristic Experiences That Must Be Experienced during their vacation, like Alcatraz or Fisherman's Wharf. Then they are putty in my hands, and we can do what I want. What I want usually includes watching movies (a suggestion that's inevitably shut down with the ever-popular, "Why would I fly all this way just to sit in a dark movie theater?" People, COME ON!) or watching the swing dancers in Golden Gate Park or watching waves and flying kites at the beach. Don't laugh. Flying a kite is strangely therapeutic.

Here's our order (plus some pretty flowers on the walk over) from Ton Kiang last weekend:

Jim, my old friend from high school, was in town. Jim and I used to eat buffalo wings and talk about heartbreak and go to the water slide park in the Wisconsin Dells together when we were 17. Now Jim is a doctor of industrial and organizational psychology and develops tests to evaluate job candidates at a major retailer whose name rhymes with Shmarget. So if you go for an interview there and get a tough question that you can't answer and that makes you feel like a fool and crushes your hopes of ever being a Shmarget team-member and donning a snappy red vest, you can blame Jim. I give you permission. I guess I am a little jealous because Jim is now a doctor of something real and I am just a doctor of ...I don't know what. Pastry? Laziness? Vacuuming? Evasion?

Ton Kiang is definitely a gringo dim sum place. You walk in the door and everybody is white except the staff. That's not exactly typical in the Richmond District, unless you are dining at Q or Burma Superstar up the road. However, Ton Kiang's dim sum is still quite good, which is not often the case when a place caters so obviously to gringoes. It's also light and bright and there aren't such long waits, and they serve the sticky rice encased in a tobacco leaf that I love so very much, so I'm happy. (Ok, it's not really a tobacco leaf, it's lotus, but it brings me joy to imagine that it is.)

When I take them to Ton Kiang, my guests are also happy since many of them are from backwards hamlets--places where you can't necessarily command a nice fresh pig's uterus on short notice at your local grocery store. They appreciate having a gentle little pictorial dim sum menu that explains their options and ingredients and specializes in non-threatening things like dumplings and Chinese broccoli so they don't accidentally wind up sucking down birdie feet or froggie parts or thousand-year-old eggs. As far as guests go, I would save those dishes for my father, who introduced beef blood soup and gizzards into my diet at a young age. Thanks Dad. See what you started?