Why My Nail Tech Is My Favorite Bay Area Foodie

Frisco Foodies is a recurring column in which a San Francisco local shares food memories of growing up in a now rapidly changing city.

I

got my first set of acrylic nails at a Vietnamese-owned nail shop at the corner of Persia and Mission: They were long and slightly curved, painted a frosty royal blue and emblazoned with white airbrush flames more suited to a Monte Carlo than a manicure. In a world before touchscreen ruled our devices, I loved the clickety-clack of plastic on computer keys. It was like having tiny masterpieces on the tips of my fingers.

As a lover of hip-hop streetwear, it was a necessary luxury — $20 for a full set, back then — that dressed up the baggiest of sweatpants. But going to the shop was rough. You might run into a drunk from the liquor store next door or get “hood-checked” waiting outside for your BFF to arrive on the bus. The corner was active, and the inside of the shop was even more chaotic and fraught with conflict.

When there was a dispute about the cost or design, Asian service workers and their clientele sometimes lashed out at each other, and the language barrier rarely allowed the communication it takes to describe an intricate design. It was no wonder that friendships between nail techs and their customers rarely blossomed.

Nowadays, I have a standing three-week appointment at Linda’s Ocean Nails on Ocean and Ashton Avenue — one I haven’t broken since the start of the pandemic, when owner Christine “Chris” Phung reopened her Ingleside district shop for her regulars, and the two of us became friends. Our relationship solidified when she recreated my favorite car’s logo: an ’87 Buick Grand National orange-and-yellow arrow that mimicked the car’s legendary turbocharged V6 engine. Since then, we’ve collaborated on the gorgeous turquoise of a San Francisco garter snake and, my personal favorite, a matte military desert camouflage design that matched my Air Max 1s.

Every new design becomes our new favorite until the next. And our love for San Francisco and shared background growing up here made it easy for us to get along.

“I gotta like you to hold your hand for two hours,” she always tells me. It’s not often that locals like me stop on Ocean Avenue, even though it’s a main thoroughfare linking the 280 freeway entrance in Mission Terrace to the beach. The Ingleside neighborhood’s meandering stoplights, double-parked grocery trucks and heavy traffic create a stop-and-go situation that requires patience, not to mention a deft lane change from time to time. It’s not a destination, though people like Chris want to change that.

Chris is the ultimate foodie, too, often choosing her mom’s home cooking over the myriad Vietnamese restaurants in the city. When she does eat out, it’s for specialties she can only get at some particular spot, her taste honed from her years growing up in the Sunset district. Whether it’s the latest boba spot or a hot new dumpling shop, I trust her opinion on whether it’s worth all the hype.

On sunny Monday in May, the shop is closed for the day, and Chris is only doing my nails so we can hang out afterward at her favorite places on Ocean — a privilege I never thought I’d experience with my nail tech. I pull up a photo from my nail inspo board on IG and show it to her; she laughs and tells me her sister sent the same video just the day before. It’s proof to us that we are usually on the same wavelength when it comes to trendy design choices. We settle on a snake-inspired holographic design. She carefully applies a builder gel to the length of my existing natural nail, an upgrade from the acrylic tips we started out with when I first came to the shop.

After we finish our set, we grab a bite across the street at Little Sweet, a Hong Kong street food eatery (not affiliated with the boba chain of the same name) that wound up closing in June. Chris had become friends with chef-owner Zoe Mak as a nail client, and Mak brought Chris dishes to test out before the business officially opened this past February.

Born and raised in Hong Kong before immigrating to the U.S. when she was 12 years old, Mak started the restaurant together with her bestie and business partner Flora Lam, a former marketing specialist whose husband is also from Hong Kong. The name, like the shop’s homemade milk tea, is “not too sweet” — the ultimate compliment for an Asian dessert.

Much of the signage and menu was in Chinese, so Chris orders me her faves from Little Sweet’s menu of Hong Kong-style dishes: the curry fish balls, garlic spareribs over rice, sticky soy sauce wings and, for dessert, an interestingly chewy papaya-and-sweet-fungus dish with a texture akin to tripe. The food is somewhere between post-bar-hop late-night munchies and the kind of snacks you’d find at a boba shop. Chris orders a side of rice to pour the extra curry over — her favorite menu hack. And while Mak is in the back, Chris herself attends to customers walking in.

“I think it’s really important to love your neighbor and support them,” Mak says. She wanted a cafe in the Ingleside just like the ones she grew up going to in Hong Kong. “Maybe people know more Mission, but not Ingleside. We’re a little bit lost. We’re like a mystery place for people.”

In the end, all the local support still couldn’t save Little Sweet. From the very beginning,  the shop suffered many setbacks, including an overnight burglary  that delayed its opening. It wound up closing after just four months — news that devastates Chris when she hears it.

“I feel that she’s so young and works so hard, and she’s so passionate about the restaurant business, you know? I just wanted to see her succeed.”

I

knew Chris was like family to me when once, during a power outage, she grabbed her tools and invited me to her house. She spread a plastic tarp and did my fill-in right there on her dining room table. “Only for you, Rocky!” she said.

Born in Vietnam, Chris left her birth country after the war because her father was of Chinese descent and was no longer welcome. They went from refugee camp to refugee camp, even living in the Philippines for a time, before finally coming to America.

She grew up in the Sunset district, attending Jefferson Elementary, Hoover Middle and Lincoln High before heading down the street to attend San Francisco State. “When we first came, everything was very difficult. We were on all sorts of [financial] assistance,” she recalls. Both of her parents worked at a sewing factory and were on welfare.

Before she opened Linda’s Ocean Nails, Chris worked at another nail salon down the street for 10 years alongside her mom while also working part-time at Wells Fargo. After majoring in accounting at San Francisco State, she decided to open the nail salon instead of becoming an accountant so that her mom could work for her and get the treatment she deserved. “I came back here and I decided to run the place myself because, you know, with the language barrier, my mom’s English was not that well, and I see her struggling with the business she’s at,” she remembers. That was in 1998. Her younger sisters, Bella and Cindy, joined them later after both acquired their cosmetology licenses.

At the time of our meeting, her mom and dad were in Vietnam on holiday, visiting friends and family they once left behind. Though it took tremendous sacrifice for Chris to keep the salon running during the pandemic and through her sisters’ multiple maternity leaves — at one point she was the shop’s lone nail tech — she was able to raise her two kids with her husband, with one daughter graduating from Lowell High School and UC Davis, while purchasing a home in the adjacent Lakeview district.

After our first lunch stop, we cross back over Ocean to Pho Ha Tien, the Vietnamese eatery right next to Chris’s shop, to meet owner Steve Cheng. Though I’m already pretty full, I always have room for pho, and their chicken pho broth turns out to be perfectly clear and abundantly seasoned. But the standout dish is their special five-spice chicken thigh, which comes deboned and served with rice — an easy dinner that Chris orders for her family every time her mom is out of the country.

Cheng also is a City kid, graduating from Redding Elementary in the Tenderloin, Marina Middle School and a year before Chris at Lincoln High. Like Chris, he took over the family business to “semi-retire” his parents, who now come in whenever they want to help or just hang out. “You can tell them to stay home and they’re like, ‘What am I gonna do at home?’” Cheng laughs. With three kids of his own, and two in their twenties, I ask if he wants to pass the business on to them. “To be honest, I don’t want them anywhere near the restaurant business,” he responds, shaking his head.

“It’s tough,” Chris agrees. During the pandemic, her landlord didn’t give the nail salon much of a break in rent, saying that they had bills to pay, too. It took a long nine months for her to open back up. In the case of Cheng’s restaurant, it took two months. He owed back pay, and the landlord still added the yearly rental increase. Both businesses just barely survived their hardest year to date, and it’s still unclear whether things are getting better or worse. “It is what it is, you just gotta weather through it,” says Cheng.

Though San Francisco allowed businesses to get out of long-term leases during the pandemic, it never gave shops like Linda’s Ocean Nails and Pho Ha Tien an incentive to stay. Once the CVS down across the street closed, Cheng noticed the decrease in foot traffic, and even more so when the Target down the block followed suit. “It’s kind of like a domino effect. You see these small businesses and it’s like, if these big franchises closed down, what chance do we have? Now every single block that you go to, there’s a minimum of three to five places shut down. You see, I can count it from here,” he says, gesturing toward the window.

Before, all three businesses were open late, and Chris would often unwind after work by ordering food and patronizing the nearby shops. There even used to be live music playing across the street. But now she takes her last client at 6:30 p.m. for safety reasons, wondering if Little Sweet’s late hours and frequent break-ins contributed to its closing. “We need mom-and-pop stores around here, especially on Ocean Ave.,” she says. But the neighborhood’s recent challenges need specialized attention from the city that goes beyond pandemic measures that many immigrant-run businesses did not take full advantage of anyway.

There are some glimmers of hope on the block, however. Some places were able to pivot, like the cafe owned by two brothers that switched up to a pizza shop when business opened back up, and the jumpy house across the street that’s promoting a night market.

“A night market would be excellent. It would draw people into Ocean Ave. and let them know we exist,” Chris says. But the little things also help — like word-of-mouth from her clients and the string of lights that the city recently installed along the avenue over the holidays. “They put ’em up and it makes it feel so bright and safe and nice. Just being there all those years, those changes make a huge difference.” She wants Ingleside to be a neighborhood where residents mingle and get to know each other.

“Like the Sunset, I want to be able to sit outside, drink coffee, enjoy the weather — well maybe not enjoy the weather,” she laughs, knowing she has to be realistic.

Though I’m hardly around Ocean Ave. in the evenings, this day in Ingleside makes me wonder about the potential of this part of the City I love. I don’t live here or even work here, but every three weeks, I drive across the bridge and make it my destination, rain or shine. Whether it’s for a chromed-out set of reptilian talons or a delicious steaming bowl of pho, I know with Chris working her magic, I’m in good hands.

Rocky Rivera is a journalist, emcee, author and activist from San Francisco. She has four musical projects out, three of those with her label Beatrock Music. She released her first book, entitled Snakeskin: Essays by Rocky Rivera, in 2021.