J&M A-1 Cafe — Restaurant in San Francisco

Owner is a great, friendly person. Which is the reason why I'm giving a 2-star instead of 1.

Because the place is understaffed, the area towards to bathroom (all the way at the back of the store) are not tidy. Somehow, on my way to the restroom (pitch dark), I stepped on a cardboard that was fully covered with materials that felt like super glue. To skip to the end of this, both of my white shoes are ruined just because I had to get one of my feet out first, and the vast amount of glue-like material underneath my shoes attracts all the possible dirt and junk in Chinatown for the next hour after the meal.

We ordered spicy tofu, clay pot rice with mushroom and chicken, shumai, and milk tea. I saw a review earlier that says the milk tea here was great -- my experience was complete opposite. Instead of tasting like milk tea (or Hong Kong milk tea), it looks like a drink with a lot of milk and minimal amount of tea (think of the color of the drink being a lot more tan, almost beige, than brown), and yet it taste 100% soy milk. It is fundamentally wrong to not being able to taste anything resemble the word tea, but it was worse that it taste like soy milk. If it helps, proper way of making the milk tea should involved condensed milk. The clay pot rice with mushroom and chicken was good, albeit with a lot of bones and less meat in it. The shumai has a weird taste that doesn't resemble my dim sum experience of +25 years, it also feels abnormally watery when chewing the shumai. The spicy tofu, per my friend, was a 2.5/5.

I'm sure some folks love this place, but my experience tells me that it isn't for me.

No photos to share because I was partly shocked, partly trying to have a conversation with my...

Personally, I don’t think this is the place to go if you’re looking for authentic Chinese cuisine. We got mapo tofu and clay pot with pork and eggplant.

Mapo tofu - not at all spicy, lacked in flavor, shredded pork tasted very weird. Clay pot - too much cornstarch made the food stickier than normal. Flavor was mid, personally did not enjoy. Something good ig was that he switched out one of the clay pots that was bad.

Service - seems super rushed, only 1 really old person is running the restaurant from service to cooking it seems. Also we just noticed after we paid that we overpaid because we added up the menu prices and tax and we probably paid $8 more than we had to. Also it’s only cash, which is kind of inconvenient.

Overall - would not go back. I don’t think it’s authentic Chinese food, the American-Chinese options looked much better and the menu was mostly those options. There are better places...

We bumped into this place when the other places we were looking for had already closed at 8 and it was one of the only ones still open. Didn't realize it was cash only so had to run to an ATM a block or two away while we waited for the food. Like others said, it's one older man doing everything so we were lucky we got in before a bit of a rush and he was running around trying to make sure not to burn the food, take more orders, clear tables, tally up bills, etc. He didn't speak good English so we kind of had to point and motion to get what we wanted and there were a couple of miscommunications but it was fine. But the food was pretty good. large portions so two entrees and a couple of steamed rice bowls was more than enough for 3 adults and we had custard buns for dessert which were so so. Hole in the wall...