Review of San Tung
San Tung is an institution in San Francisco. The restaurant is famous for their dry fried chicken wings which people will wait 2-3 hours for! If you arrive during a peak eating time, it is a given that there will be a wait to eat. Eating at San Tung is truly an experience. It is always jam packed full of people no matter what time you eat! There are always people having some sort of celebration at a large table, and it looks like they ordered the whole menu. The food comes fairly quickly so you don’t have to keep staring at other people’s delicious food!
Unfortunately, during my most recent visit, I was unable to eat in person at San Tung due to the COVID pandemic. I got take out and brought it home instead. Although some of the dishes suffered in transit, it was still a delicious meal.
Starting with the most famous dish from San Tung- the dry fried chicken wings. These wings are incredibly crispy, even after sitting for 45 minutes in our car as we drove home. They are tossed in a sweet and spicy garlicky sauce that has Szechuan peppercorns in it. The peppercorns add a numbing type of spice that isn’t in your face; it just adds more complex flavor to the dish. When you eat at the restaurant, you will see at least one order of these wings on every table! These are by far the best thing on their menu.
Next are the dry sautéed stringbeans. They have a nice snap to them and have a light garlic flavor. This dish definitely suffered from the reheating and transportation. When I’ve eaten them in the restaurant, they delightfully crispy.
The shrimp and leek dumplings have a good filling to wrapper ratio. They are stuffed with chopped shrimp and leeks. These dumplings have a nice flavor, but are definitely not as good as Din Tai Fung dumplings.
The vegetarian chow mein lacked flavor, and the noodles weren’t as chewy as I wanted them to be. This is probably because they weren’t eaten right out of the pan. There also was a surprisingly small amount of veggies in the dish considering it was a veggie version. I would skip this dish.
We also ordered two different types of wok-fried potstickers; one was filled with pork and the other was filled with veggies. These potstickers had way too much wrapper compared to filling- I ended up tearing some off. I thought the pork filling had a nice ginger and garlic flavor too it, however the thick wrapper took away from the overall dumpling.
The veggie potsticker didn’t have much flavor, it was just salty. There was a better filling to wrapper ratio in the veggie potstickers, but it was still not ideal. The potstickers definitely suffered from the car ride home. They weren’t crispy, even after we tried crisping them up in a pan. I would skip the potstickers if you are not eating at the restaurant.
