Food I'm Eating/Places I'm Visiting: Yank Sing in San Francisco

Santa Rosa has a good restaurant for dim sum – San Francisco stalwart Hang Ah has a branch right here in town (2130 Armory Drive). It looks funny because the building was once an A&W Root Beer restaurant, but the food is good. Sometimes, though, I get a hankering for dim sum in the city (for those of you not in the SF Bay Area, here “the city” means San Francisco), which always feels more authentic. Having some business to attend to in nearby Berkeley yesterday (picking up a new futon we had made), we decided to make a day of it. 

My favorite dim sum place in San Francisco is a humble place called S&T Hong Kong Seafood, at 2578 Noriega St. We’ve been going there for years. Another favorite was Tom Kiang, on Geary St. near 20th Avenue (no longer in operation) along with the place right next door – until the chef changed at the latter and things went abruptly downhill.

However, thinking it would be fun to try something different, I went on line and searched “best San Francisco dim sum,” which brought up sites with recommended restaurants. The consensus was that Yank Sing in the Rincon Center was the best place in the city for good dumplings. When I saw on Yank Sing’s website that they offer $4 dollar parking with validation, I was sold. 

There was a bonus. The Rincon Center includes the historic Rincon Annex Post Office, an Art Deco building built in 1940, now part of a complex with apartments, offices, and shops. It preserves New Deal murals by artist Anton Refregier. The post office closed in the 1980s, but the lobby with the murals is intact, integrated into the Rincon Center development. The old post office lobby is worth a look if you have any interest in New Deal art, Art Deco architecture, or the history of the US Post Office. 

But, back to dim sum. Yank Sing was a disappointment. It was fun to pick dishes off the circulating carts (a feature many dim sum restaurants have abandoned) and I liked the elegant glass teapots. The curry and vegetable dumplings were an unusual variation and the barbecue pork rice noodles were good, but, on the whole, I was expecting more from a restaurant with a Michelin rating that people claim is the best in San Francisco. In addition, most of the offerings were not as hot as I would have liked (the xiao long bao buns were barely warm). 

The meal for two came to $138 plus tip, which I would have happily paid for a memorable experience, but, as I say, the food was mostly unexceptional. It felt quite overpriced. At S&T Seafood on Noriega, the same meal would have been about $65 and the food would have been as good or better. Additionally, S&T is always filled with Chinese families and friends speaking Cantonese, which adds to the charm (at Yank Sing, the only Asians present were working at the restaurant). At Yank Sing, you pay for the location. I won’t be going back, except perhaps to look at the post office lobby again if I happen to be in the neighborhood. 

After lunch, we strolled over to see what was new at the Ferry Building, stopped in briefly at the San Franciso Railway Museum (77 Steuart St), which presents the history of the municipal trolleys the city runs using cars purchased from defunct trolley systems all over the world, and then ran over to the Legion of Honor to see the Manet & Morisot show before heading home by way of the futon shop in Berkeley. All in all, a fun day despite disappointing dim sum.

Places I'm Visiting: 140 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco

Yesterday, I drove into San Francisco to attend an open house at Crown Point Press, on Hawthorne St. I had to leave the event fairly early to take part in a zoom call about Art Trails, Sonoma County’s premier open studios event scheduled for the second two weekends in October. I had brought my laptop along in the car to join the meeting. I parked on the street near The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA) after leaving the Minna St. Garage to listen to the call and left the key in the ignition. It must have been turned to the standby position as, 40 minutes later, my battery was dead.

I called AAA and, while I waited for a battery jump to arrive, I strolled around the neighborhood and found myself in front of the building at 140 New Montgomery Street, a building I’ve often admired looking up from the patio outside the café at SF MOMA. It has some great exterior decoration in the Art Deco style, especially near the top of the tower, but I had never been in the building, so I stopped in for a look at the lobby. 

According to Wikipedia and other sources, it was built as the headquarters of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, completed in 1925, so it has now stood for a century. It is 26 storeys high. Apparently, it was referred to as simply the Telephone Building although its official name was the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company Building (not surprisingly), and, later (after 1984), as The Pacific Bell Building or The PacBell Building. 

At completion, it was the tallest building in San Francisco, and, along with the Russ Building, which was the same height (built two years later), it retained that honor until 1964. AT&T sold the building in 2007 after which it remained empty for about six years before a renovation that updated the interior and adapted it to mixed office use. It was designed by architects Timothy L. Pflueger, James Rupert Miller, and Alexander Cantin of architecture firms Miller and Pflueger and Perkins & Will. Construction began in 1924. The doors opened in May 1925. Wikipedia says the building's design was influenced by Eliel Saarinen’s Tribune Tower, in Chicago, particularly the stepped setbacks on the upper floors (Eliel Saarinen was the father of Eero Saarinen, who designed the beautiful TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport, probably the first important building I ever experienced, as a child living in Brooklyn).

Reflecting its connection with the Bell Telephone company, terra cotta decorations on the façade and decorations in the lobby feature bell motifs. There is a large bell over the arched front entryway, for example, and there are bells in the metalwork around the elevators inside. It was the large statues of eagles at the top of the building that first caught my eye when viewing it from SF MOMA (always putting me in mind of the main train station in Milan; I neglected to photograph the eagles yesterday). According to Wikipedia again, the eagles are each 4m high and originally made of granite, but those visible today are fiberglass replicas of the originals, which were damaged beyond repair in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. 

In the lobby, most striking are the superbly polished stone floors, the dark marble walls, intricate metalwork detailing, the chandeliers, and the fancy ceiling decorated with botanical motifs, clouds, dragons, and phoenixes. The ceiling looks like a Chinese textile. Wikipedia also notes that Winston Churchill visited the building in 1929 and that from it he made his first transatlantic phone call, to his home in London (presumably routed through somewhere like New York on the East Coast). As I’ve always wondered about 140 New Montgomery St., I didn’t let my battery issue perturb me too much. I enjoyed the opportunity to see the historic lobby and to learn a little about this interesting structure. 

Places I'm Visiting: San Francisco Maritime Museum (February 17, 2014)

I made a brief stop at San Francisco's Maritime Museum recently, where Polk St. meets the Bay, in the city's Aquatic Park Historic District, part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, which includes the park area, the Maritime Museum, a visitor's center in the Argonaut Hotel building, a library and research facility, and a number of historic ships moored nearby. It had been years since I'd been to the museum, which I remembered mostly for some extraordinary ship models long housed there. I arrived only about 20 minutes before closing, having been in the area on other business, but it was enough time to get a taste of the rather startlingly beautiful murals on the interior walls of the museum building, designed by William Mooser Jr. and William Mooser III, and originally built as a bathhouse in the Art Deco style. The bathhouse and its museum were shut down for several years for renovation, but the building appears to have re-opened recently. The murals have been cleaned. They glow with color.

The bathhouse was begun in 1936 and completed in 1939. The fanciful aquatic murals inside are by Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966), known as an artist, but also as a psychologist, a color theorist, and a jazz musician. He was an author as well. His 1942 book Color Harmony and Pigments cast problems of color in art in psychological terms rather than in terms of physics and the physiology of perception. He lived in Paris before WWII and again in his later years. He died there in 1966.

The decorations, the bathhouse, and the park were WPA projects. I can't imagine how I missed the murals in the past, but they appear to have been covered with a layer of grime and the old displays in the museum obscured them.

Today it's possible to enjoy their bright colors and flowing lines again. I spent my short time in the main room photographing details. There is a picture everywhere you look. It's projects like this one that I think of when I hear people complain about too much government, about excessive government spending, about government intruding into spheres of activity best left to private enterprise. The WPA put people to work who needed work, and many of the WPA's projects created art of enduring beauty, facilities of lasting appeal. Generations of San Franciscans and visitors to the city have enjoyed the park and the museum for nearly 80 years now. Although the museum building itself appears to have had something of a checkered history (having been used as a casino and an army facility, among other things), ultimately it has proved a worthwhile spending of taxpayer money. I, for one, am delighted it's there. Seeing the murals was thrilling. Some forms of government intrusion, if this is intrusion, seem greatly to be celebrated.

I hope to make another visit soon to explore the rest of the building. Hiler's "Prismatarium," a color wheel illustrating his color theories and conceived of on the pattern of a planetarium, is on the ceiling of one of the other rooms in the building. In its coherent design and decorations, there is something about the bathhouse that put me in mind of Gaudi's Casa Batllo, in Barcelona. There's much to be seen in the rest of the museum, on the historic ships, and in the visitor's center, but it was worth the trip just to get a brief view of the murals before closing.