Review: Old Mandarin Islamic

(415) 564-3481
Continuing on the Chronicle’s bargain bites path, I went with a couple friends to check out this restaurant. Did it really qualify for cheap eats, by San Francisco Chinese food standards? We went for a Saturday lunch, it was a nice day, and so we drove way out there to Vicente and the 40s.

First observations:

• No one else was there. It was high noon. Where were the diners? Hmmm.
• Menus (including take-out menus) were fancy 4-color productions. You don’t want Grubgirl on your board – because for a budget operation, I like to see low expenses. Wow, 4-color menus AND takeout menus are expensive. Also the menus didn’t have little white sticky paper over the prices (which some Chinese restaurants do when they raise prices). This means that prices haven’t been raised in a while, or, GASP, they reprint these expensive menus anytime the prices go up!

I stated to my companions that dishes would be considered expensive if they were over $7. Yep. They were in the high $7+ range.

We ordered black bean noodles (for GS’s hangover), and a dish of beef with sautéed green beans. To keep the costs down, we didn’t get any rice, considering we’d have enough carbs in the black bean noodles.

I don’t really know that Islamic Chinese food is…but I guess it means they serve lamb and no pork. The region is in the North, GS said, close to Mongolia.

The food was fine – not overwhelmingly delicious, but satisfying. We quickly finished up our dishes and actually continued to a second lunch at Lam Hoa Thuan. LHT was packed with Asians…we realized that we’d found the right spot on the second try.