Good Taste is a menu for eating well in the Bay Area. This week, we visit the brand new Crustacean (195 Pine Street, San Francisco) and reflect on the An family’s legacy in the city.
For decades, I’ve heard about the trademarked Secret Kitchens at the former Polk Street location of Crustacean—the local favorite launched in 1991 by Helene An—and at Thanh Long, the Sunset District restaurant that started the An family’s long history of serving Vietnamese roast crab and garlic noodles.
That combo has made its way into the lexicon of San Francisco food classics, which includes such indispensible items as sourdough bread and cioppino. The crab and garlic noodles recipes are only known by the An family and its extended members (spouses included), and the dishes are cooked in secret kitchens within larger kitchens in the restaurant.
A few weeks ago, when I was invited to a luncheon at the stunning new Financial District location of Crustacean, I saw the outside of the Secret Kitchen with my own eyes. There are a pair of trap doors, and when the outer door is raised to collect the dish for serving, the door to the inner kitchen snaps shut, so not even the kitchen staff can see how the crab and garlic noodles are made.
Despite these precautions, chefs everywhere (including my amateur self) have tried to crack the code of the garlic noodles—note to the New York Times and others, they aren’t made with dried spaghetti. You’ll just have to go to Crustacean, Thanh Long, or their An The Go food truck to taste the real thing.
Family matriarch Helene grew up as the youngest of 17 children in an aristocratic family who had three private chefs (one Chinese, one French and one Vietnamese), escaping the country during the fall of Saigon, living in a refugee camp in Guam, eventually settling in San Francisco, where she transformed an old Italian deli that her mother-in-law bought on a whim during a vacation into the crab and garlic noodle institution, Thanh Long, in 1971. Crustacean opened on Polk Street in 1991, and reopened on Pine Street this past July 18.
“I believe that food must not only taste good, but also be good for you,” Helene said in her and daughter Jacqueline An’s 2016 cookbook An: To Eat (Recipes and Stories from a Vietnamese Family Kitchen. “How food feels on the palate is also very important to me. Food shouldn’t be heavy, sticky, overpowering, fatty or oily. Complex flavors and textures must always be balanced with freshness and lightness.”
Daughter Monique An and her husband Kenneth Lew are in charge of the newest establishment, with support from her sister Elizabeth An, the director of the family’s House of An restaurant group as well as Crustacean Beverly Hills. Elizabeth designed the new space and even brought artwork from her home.
Help us save local journalism!
Every tax-deductible donation helps us grow to cover the issues that mean the most to our community. Become a 48 Hills Hero and support the only daily progressive news source in the Bay Area.
In addition to the secret kitchen dishes, there are also now some greatest hits from the Beverly Hills Crustacean restaurant on the San Francisco menu, including tuna cigars, vegan crab cakes, Wagyu and bone marrow dumplings, and a Caesar salad made out of kohlrabi. The new space feels like a modernized extension of Southern California’s restaurant, with one exception: San Francisco’s Crustacean doesn’t have a fish pond in the floor, a major design element in Beverly Hills.
The An family has had a major impact on hospitality and dining throughout California, and Helene An was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2024. Like her daughter Elizabeth, she flew up to San Francisco to help Monique open this gorgeous new space, and it was super exciting to briefly meet her and thank her for so much deliciousness. I definitely fangirled over her!
Tamara publishes the California Eating and Food Book Club newsletters.
