NORTHERN CHINA BBQ — Restaurant in San Francisco

Bring an apron or something to cover your cothes. You'll have so much fun, you'll stain your clothes. Don’t wear white shirts :)

The friendly husband is the chief chef and the beautiful slender sweet young wife is managing the place. Tin, a young gentleman, my table server was a bit shy but i got him to smile in the end with my money flower + tip.

Abby, your table servant needs to be trained how to be a table servant. He doesn't have the knowledge of the dishes. He needs basic greetings. Please get a restaurant consultant to upgrade your services. It's usually the services that make people come everyday.

HOURS OF OPERATION 5 🌟 Open till late. Later than most places. Call and check

TOILET - clean and beautiful. Ladies, you will appreciate this toilet.

WHEN TO COME HERE If you worked till late and need to eat something to compliment rice, got hungry after tumbling on the bed, went to a bar or nightclub and got hungry, after a big wedding, took a shower and just want to be fed well just with the 2 of you only, birthdays, after the movies, farewell party, it's a great place to wear casual clothes, flipflops, hair still wet, and eat to your heart content. It is 3 blocks away from COSTCO. They play Chinese pop music. It's chearful and gentle. Colorful lights. Good vibe. People are there to get a little goofy and talk loud. So, it's not a candle light first date location. Look at my photos.

LOCATION 5 🌟 conveniently near all the nightclubs on Folsom (@9th street 3 blocks away from COSTCO)

PRICE & PORTIONS 5 🌟 Affordable, large portions, best BBQ and hot iron pot Chinese dishes in San Francisco. I ordered 8 people worth of food for $185 + $30 tip. That came out $28 per person.

FOOD 3 🌟 Every dish is carefully cooked. BBQ is bit over flavored and over cooked. Their 🌺 Sweet and Spicy Seaweed is to die for.

🌺 EGG FRIED RICE - this chef loves his fried rice. It is cooked to perfection. If you cook, you know. Fried rice tells you everything about the chef. It's a large portion. You can just eat this with beer or soda and call it dinner.

VEGAN & VEGETARIAN 3 🌟 I ordered the 🌺 Sweet and Spicy Seaweed as my rice compliment. Oh my goodness!! It has citantro, garlic, really thinly sliced crunchy kelp. 🌺 Chives BBQ was a nice surprise. 🌺 Enoki wrapped in Tofu Skin was a blast. 🌺 Okra BBQ was addictive. Next time, I am there, I'm going to order a bunch of those.

IRON POT DISHES 4 🌟 - these are huge portions. Each pot will serve 4 ppl. If you ordered 2 pots, that's for really really hungry 8 ppl. I guess you can top it on rice and slammed them down. 🌺 Beef tendon Pot melts in your mouth. Hard working people, this is stamiooooo.

Abby, go apprentice under a few large 5 star...

This is the most difficult food establishment to review I've ever come across. I'll start with the straightforward stuff. My wife and I went there on a whim on a Sunday noon in Aug 2024. When we entered we were told they had been open for only a month. There was only one other party of two, so the place was the opposite of busy. We ordered the spicy fish pot with 3 add-ons and two meat skewers to sample. My wife is from China and judged the food to be 4-stars authentic when it arrived after about 20 minutes. We enjoyed the hot pot and skewers — if asked then and there, we would've given 4 stars. We later also ordered a portion of the stinky tofu, which took another 15 minutes, even though we then were the only customers. Overall the service was fast enough and a solid 4 stars with no complications, but I can't quite imagine how fast the service would be with more than a few parties dining at the same time.

I will say the cleanliness was just about "good" after only one month of operation. Unfortunately my wife started having a bit of an upset stomach and a mild headache two hours after our dining experience. We suspect there was a load of MSG in the food. Therefore just 3 stars for the food.

My other big gripe is the menu prices. They were definitely not "great" as many of the reviews claim (a few of them even claimed a cost of $10–20 per person, which I just can't see happening). We took the stinky tofu home, but even discounting that, we paid $48 before tax and tips for just the spicy pot and two meat skewers.

This gets me to my last point of irritation. I know that competing in the tough food scene that is San Francisco is difficult. I suppose many restaurants play it a bit fast and lose when it comes to grabbing people's attention. However this case is too blatant for me to stomach. When we visited one month after their opening, more than half of their 33 reviews on Google Maps appear to be manufactured (see screenshot of one particularly obvious example). Read on for the details.

15 reviews (avg. 5.0) were from accounts with just 1 or 2 reviews; 3 reviews (avg. 5.0) from accounts with 3 or 4 reviews. Only 8 reviews were from accounts with at least 10 reviews. All reviews with less than 5 stars were from accounts with 10 or more reviews.

Overall, I would not recommend this place unless they (a) stop playing it fast and loose on their online PR, (b) improve their food quality and reduce their use of MSG, (c) put a strict reign on their prices (even with 5-star food these prices are barely acceptable), and (d) work on their...

We liked it and want to go back and try more dishes.

The pigs' ear salad was our favourite.

The skewers were fun and small so you get to try lots of things. In order of my preference: chicken heart skewer, enoki in bacon wrap, okra, a choy, crispy chicken skin, beef scalded aorta skewer, and kidneys. (The kidneys were strong. At home, before cooking kidneys, we soak them in milk so we're used to milder tasting kidneys.)

Although, I love eggplant, I recommended skipping the grilled eggplant dish here: it was overly greasy and garlicky and hard to eat.

The pancake with beef was tasty, reminiscent of a döner kebab.

There is no alcohol, but it looked like a licence has been applied for.

Make sure that your phone batteries are topped up. You order online, scanning a code that matches your table number. It's a little odd, because you don't really know if your order has gone through until it shows up at your table. Also, you don't pay through the app, but you do use the app to request to pay. And then the server comes...