Good Taste is a menu for eating well in the Bay Area and beyond, as this week’s look at an iconic California dish reveals!
Earlier this year, I had the distinct honor and joy to usher in Tết, the Vietnamese New Year, by having lunch with the groundbreaking chef Helene An at the Southern California location of Crustacean (468 N. Bedford Drive, Beverly Hills).
An, 82, does not get enough credit for creating her world famous garlic noodles, which are also served with succulent roasted Dungeness crab, lobster, and other seafood treasures at the San Francisco location of Crustacean (195 Pine Street, SF) and Thanh Long (4101 Judah Street, SF). Nor does she get the appropriate light for being an immigrant woman chef with longevity who raised five businesswomen.
Helene An’s garlic noodles have spawned countless imitators in food trucks, restaurants, and home kitchens across California and the nation. I’ve risked smelling like garlic for the rest of my days to come to the educated conclusion that no one does these noodles like she does. Sweet, slightly salty, with a lasting umami bomb that may cause a pleasant tongue clicking and/or the sensation of eyes rolling back.
Garlic noodles didn’t come from Vietnam, where An grew up as the youngest of 17 children in an aristocratic family who had three private chefs (one Chinese, one French and one Vietnamese). An says she created the recipe in San Francisco as a young mother in response to her daughter Elizabeth’s requests for money to go get Italian pasta in Nob Hill. In other words, the original, “We have food at home” later became one of California’s culinary calling cards.
“I believe that food must not only taste good, but also be good for you,” Helene wrote in 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.”
Helene’s daughter Monique An and Monique’s husband Kenneth Lew are at the helm of Crustacean in San Francisco. Lew happily demonstrates that the much-lored secret garlic noodle-producing kitchen within the Crustacean kitchens are actually real! They’re sealed off from the rest of the staff by a trap door-like contraption that serves up the finished plates of noodles, dropping no clue as to how they’ve been prepared.
Monique shared a fun fact that cements the status of garlic noodles in San Francisco: They are in rotation for lunch in the San Francisco Unified School District, where her granddaughter can share with her friends that her grandmother invented them.
Back in Beverly Hills, Helene revealed the biggest secret: there is one viable way besides being a family member to get her to share the recipe for her garlic noodles!
“They can have it if they work for me for over 10 years,” she revealed.
It was tempting to ask for a job on the spot and mark the days, because I really want that recipe. I published a well-tested home recipe for An’s garlic noodles in a 2022 Good Taste column. My version uses fresh egg noodles instead of dry spaghetti, which is an outrageous ingredient in the New York Times recipe, and I’d duel with my dish any day!
An fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon, lived in a refugee camp in Guam, and eventually settled in San Francisco, where she lived with several relatives in a one-bedroom house in the Sunset District. She worked as an accountant during the day. At night, she helped out in the old Italian deli that her mother-in-law bought on a whim during a vacation, overpaying for the privilege. That deli became Thanh Long, which still draws crowds from across the Bay to the edge of the Pacific in pursuit of a cracking good time.
After relocating from its longtime Polk Street space, San Francisco’s Crustacean is approaching one year in business in the Financial District. It’s the An family’s most stunningly designed space—including the famous fish embedded in the floor in the Beverly Hills restaurant—and is the most exquisite and homey of them all.
As the anniversary approaches, San Francisco’s Crustacean recently launched a “FiDi Power Lunch” prix fixe menu (three courses for $46 on Tuesdays-Thursdays from 11:30am to 2:30pm). That’s going straight into my rotation of upscale downtown afternoon recommendations, whether for a business meeting or memory-making occasion, because it’s an opportunity to see the restaurant’s range.
Anyone would be forgiven for adding a plate of garlic noodles to the table.
