Ton Kiang: Dim Sum by San Francisco's Best Slave Labor
Written: Dec 15 '01 (Updated Sep 30 '02)
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Pros: Tasty, tasty grub. No filler. Comfortable, if spartan, environment.
Cons: You should feel guilty eating here.
The Bottom Line: Read the review. That's why it's there. I presume you can read more than 30 words at a time.
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| Mr.Eyore's Full Review: Ton Kiang |
If I was any kind of real man, I‘d stand by my convictions, and here I go, about to not stand by two of them, maybe more. The first is that I’m reviewing a restaurant that’s already been reviewed very well by someone else. But this’ll be only the 4th review, so I’ll forgive me on that.
I have a little more trouble forgiving me for going to Ton Kiang, for ordering food delivered from Ton Kiang and for singing Ton Kiang’s praises. Ton Kiang is an evil, evil little company that treats its employees like dirt. About two years ago, the Wage and Hour Division of California’s Industrial Welfare Commission found them guilty of failing to pay over $100,000 in wages to its workers. In response, Ton Kiang fired every employee that had been a party to the suit and refused to pay the wages anyway, setting off a bitter struggle for settlements, picketers out front, and the general disdain of the Pro-Labor community. If I was any kind of man, I’d still be boycotting this place.
Shut the F*ck up Already, Leftie-Boy, and Get to the Damn Review
Yeah, I’m on it.
So the fact is, in spite of all that other stuff, Ton Kiang has very, very good food, and they provide simply the finest Chinese delivery in the city. At least any part of the city that’s close enough that they’ll deliver to me. I am a sellout, and I should be pelted with dumplings. Preferably pork shu mai, if ya don’t mind.
Dim Sum
Used to be when I had visitors from out of town, I took them all on the same Sunday morning walking tour through the tourist traps: Through Union Square and up to Chinatown, stop for dim sum brunch, up to North Beach and down Broadway to Embarcadero and a beer at Pier 23, then to Pier 39 for, I don’t know, t-shirts and pictures of seals, then to Fisherman’s wharf, Ghiradelli Square and a cable car back to Union Square. Sometimes there was a side trip on the bus to the Golden Gate bridge or a walk through Fort Mason.
I still do the tour every once in a while, but I’ve erased the dim sum brunch in Chinatown thing. Friends and relatives from Florida, Delaware and the San Fernando Valley just can’t get past carts full of chicken feet and organ soup and whatnot and they skew toward a xenophobic distaste for restaurants where they can’t speak the same language as their waiters. So I take them to Ton Kiang instead.
Not that Ton Kiang is a white people’s Chinese restaurant. It’s the real deal. I think. But it has the feel of a white people’s restaurant, which makes my white people feel more comfortable.[1]
Tong Kiang has the standard list of dim sum (and for brunch, it’s the dim sum you want). In terms of quality, I would place it in the top three or four dim sum palaces in the city. Predictably, it is also one of the more expensive ones. But when it comes to dim sum, you get what you pay for (unless you’re eating at Yank Sing, where you sometimes pay for stuff you don’t get, or this other place that I recently discovered whose name I don’t know but is really cheap and really good).[2] Ton Kiang’s dim-sum is well built, not greasy, and absolutely delicious.
On their main dim sum menu, Ton Kiang has about 22 different items, but let’s be honest, there are really only, like, 4 dim sums. You got your steamed shrimps stuff (bol choy gao, ha gao, gao choy got, dao miu gao, dai dze gao, siu choy gao and fun got) which, pretty much all taste the same. Try ‘splaining to me the difference in taste sensation between shrimp and pea-tip dumpling and shrimp and green chive dumpling. You got your steamed pork stuff (shu mai, potstickers) You got your sweet stuff (sesame balls, egg custard rice cakes) and you got your buns ... er, baos ... of the pork or pork/veggie variety. Plus you got an egg roll. So that’s five things, actually.
The dim sum runs about $3.50 an order, and you typically get 3 dumplings per order. A little more than the Chinatown places, but, what, maybe 25 cents, so, deal.
Dinner
For a town that has so very much Chinese food, I have sometimes been surprised that the places that deliver in my neighborhood are so uneven. I have tried about 10 of them on multiple occasions, and found that I had to keep meticulous notes on my menus to keep track of which ones made which things well. One place might make great Orange chicken and lousy, inedible Mongolian beef. Another place has great walnut shrimp, but gooey, flavorless chow fun. You can count on just about everything at Ton Kiang to be delicious.
My favorite dish from Ton Kiang is the black pepper beef strips ($8.00). This large serving of good quality steak has almost no filler in it: It’s simply strips of beef and scallions cooked in pepper and meat stock. It has a little bite to it, which is good, and it’s still tasty the next day.
Their Orange Chicken ($7.50) is totally propa. Perfect spicy-sweet, with that dull bitterness that only comes from using real orange peel in the sauce. And again, no filler. Just big hunks o’ chicken parts. Not even big globules of batter or anything. When you skimp on salaries like these people do, you can afford to give your customers nothing but white meat for the same price as the filler people give you ick.
I always get an order of their fried wontons, which are perfectly crispy and about half of the wontons will have a little bay shrimp or two tucked into the folds on either end. I don’t know what that’s about, the shrimps, but I likes.
I’ve tried other stuff there, which mostly I can’t remember, except that I know it was mostly unobjectionable. Except the lobster. Skip the lobster. It’s watery and not well prepared in either its ginger bath or it’s scallion and peppers format. It’s simply not worth the money, which was, like, maybe, forty dollars or something, but I don’t really know, because they wouldn’t tell me when I asked, and there weren’t any American style numbers on the final bill.
I also should mention that I tried a fried tofu triangles thing, which also had little shrimps tucked into the hypotenuse section, except that these little shrimps were big-a-s-s prawns. I mention it just to kind of boast that I’ve eaten tofu once, because ordinarily even the idea of eating anything called curd would nauseate me. But I liked theirs. It as hot and kind of creamy-solid, and sweet. Plus they had the shrimps.
Service:
The service at Ton Kiang, at both the brunch and the dinner sittings, is atrocious. It’s not uncommon during the dim sum hours for a whole team of roving servers to simply forget about an entire section of the restaurant, leaving 20 minute breaks between rounds of servings. You can count on the little things not being done right. Water may never come. A request for some extra chili sauce will be forgotten. A drink will come well after you’ve finished eating. Your check may wait forever at the edge of the table. And stuff like that.
But don’t hold it against them. Remember, they’re working for free.
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[1]And if I was any kind of real man, I’d go looking through Kboo’s reviews for that word she uses for Chinese restaurants that cater to white-folk tastes, which I can’t remember now. But it’s an apt word, so go read her.
[2]I wrote a review about Yank Sing. Maybe a year ago or so. Go find it.
Recommended:
Yes
Kid Friendliness: Yes
Vegetarian Friendly: Yes
Notes, Tips or Menu Recommendations Never play poker against guys with gray beards that have turned kind of yellow near the mouth. Even if they're not good enough to beat you, they're kind of gross to look at.
Best Suited For: Friends
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Mr.Eyore
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I come for the pervasive sense of elitist self-importance and semi-witty expressions of faux camaraderie
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