The Best Dishes I Ate in 2024

For me, the first four years (!) of this decade in Bay Area food were largely defined by pandemic-era takeout and cozy meals eaten close to home. In many ways, I felt as though my whole world had contracted, as more and more interactions were filtered through Zoom meetings, QR codes and delivery apps. So, this year I really wanted to get back to exploring the entirety of the Bay Area food scene in a more robust and deliberate way — its creative pop-ups; its distant, outer-suburban enclaves; and, especially, its underappreciated late-night haunts.

The good news? The scene is just as delicious and joyous as ever. Here, then, are 10 of my favorite dishes from 2024, presented in roughly the chronological order in which I ate them:

1. Surti egg gotala at Egglicious India

4996 Stevens Creek Blvd., San Jose

I’ve always been a big egg person, but no restaurant exploded my view of how many different ways you might cook a chicken egg than Egglicious, San Jose’s fully “eggetarian” Indian restaurant, where a single dish might include three or four different imaginative egg preparations. I was especially amazed by the Surti egg gotala, a kind of thick curry topped with both a runny-yolked fried egg and a couple of hard-boiled eggs grated into coarse white shavings that resembled shredded mozzarella cheese. Scooped up with fluffy pav rolls, it was the most flavorful three-egg plate I’d eaten in years.

2. Garlic butter crab at A-One Kitchen

677 San Mateo Ave., San Bruno

Because of my ongoing Midnight Diners series, this has largely been a year of exploring the Bay Area’s much-disparaged late-night food scene, which, to be totally transparent, I only had modest hopes for at the start of the project. But I remember exactly when my expectations flipped on their head: dinner at A-One Kitchen, a festive Thai-Chinese spot across the street from the Artichoke Joe’s casino that stays open until 1 a.m. We feasted on garlicky, butter-soaked roast Dungeness crab and heaping plates of garlic noodles, and everything was so delicious, it made me realize that in some cases the Bay Area’s late-night food is also its best food — straight up. No caveats necessary.

3. Meat pie at E Le Aɖe Test Kitchen Pop-Up at Cafe Colucci

5849 San Pablo Ave., Oakland

My favorite fine dining meal of the year was a Ghanaian-Ethiopian fusion pop-up by Chef Selasie Dotse, hosted on the back patio at Cafe Colucci. As a person who sometimes finds tasting menu food a little bit samey-samey, this was the cannon blast of bold diasporic flavors I was looking for: a yam pave spiked with fiery chile-and-tomato hot sauce that knocked me upside the head, rockfish “kitfo” and injera reimagined as a kind of fish taco, and on and on. My favorite was the chef’s take on suya — the spice rub applied, in this case, to braised oxtail that was stuffed inside a gorgeous, flaky pastry, with a side of zippy peanut romesco sauce for dipping. Delicious. (Unfortunately, Dotse’s E Le Aɖe pop-up series ended shortly after the dinner I attended, and the chef is moving to the East Coast. But Cafe Colucci’s patio is worth keeping an eye on as it’s become a regular landing spot for similarly audacious pop-ups.)

4. Crawfish boil at Cajun Bistro 7

3005 Silver Creek Rd. Ste. 116, San Jose

Maybe the best crawfish I’ve ever eaten in my life can be found at this little San Jose strip mall spot that serves Viet-Cajun seafood boils until 4 a.m. every night (because each day’s shipment of live crawfish comes in from Louisiana — or the Sacramento delta during the off season — at 5). Cajun Bistro 7’s creamy, garlicky seafood-boil sauces are extremely addicting, but it was the freshness of the little crustaceans themselves that blew my mind — so plump, toothsome and naturally sweet.

5. Watermelon bing soo at Ping Yang

955 Larkin St., San Francisco

It would be hard to orchestrate a more perfect meal of homey comfort food than the dinner I had at this cozy Thai cafe this spring: pad see ew topped with wok-seared pork jowl and a simple Thai omelette over jasmine rice. Dessert, on the other hand, was a straight-up showstopper: a giant bing soo (Korean shaved ice) served inside a hollowed-out watermelon rind and piled high with melon balls that looked like gleaming bright red jewels. But while the presentation may have been flashy, the pleasures of this bing soo were just as plain and comforting as the rest of the meal — ripe, juicy fruit and sweet, condensed milk–infused ice shaved so finely it was like digging my spoon into the fluffiest freshly fallen powder snow.

6. Strawberry and dou hua at Piglet & Co.

2170 Mission St., San Francisco

Speaking of dessert, the most memorable dish of my first meal at Piglet & Co. — a stylish, Taiwanese-inspired fusion spot in the Mission — was the chefs’ take on douhua, or tofu pudding, a ginger-syrup-soaked treat I’d enjoyed, hot or cold, during trips to Taipei ever since I was a kid. In Piglet & Co.’s ingenious version, the tofu was blended and whipped, so that it took on the texture of an airy mousse. On top, there was a layer of crushed sesame brittle and a few sprigs of fresh mint; fresh strawberries were hidden underneath. The overall effect was magical: like a nostalgic bowl of Lunar New Year’s tangyuan zhuzhed up with a dash of Bay Area summer.

7. Dino beef rib at Fikscue

1708 Park St., Alameda

In the months since I first wrote about it, this scrappy, self-styled “Indo-Tex” barbecue spot in Alameda has blown up even more, getting named one of the best new restaurants in the entire country by national outlets like Eater and The New York Times, and gearing up to open a flashy new location at the Chase Center. The thing about Fikscue is that Chef Fik Saleh’s Texas-style ’cue is good enough to make this list all on its own — I still daydream about the gigantic dino beef rib, which was so tender and fatty that it wobbled obscenely each time I nudged the meat with my fork. But the genius of Fikscue is how well the barbecue goes with all of the Indonesian side dishes — the peanut slaw, creamy kale curry and smoke-kissed nasi goreng fried rice.

8. Cantonese barbecue at Go Duck Yourself

439 Cortland Ave., San Francisco

Late in the pandemic, my favorite old-school SF Chinatown butcher shop, Hing Lung Company, relocated to Bernal Heights, built out a handsome new dining room, adopted a jokey new moniker — and somehow the food got even better?? Maybe it’s because I finally got to taste the Cheung brothers’ Cantonese barbecue the way God intended it to be eaten: hot and fresh without having sat for 20 minutes in a takeout box. What I still can’t decide for the life of me, though, is which I love more: the roast pork belly, with its immaculately crunchy skin, or the absurdly juicy (and conveniently deboned) duck, which was especially delicious drizzled with soy sauce and rendered fat over hot white rice. Luckily, you don’t have to choose.

9. Charcoal-grilled ribs at Hết Sẩy

Various locations, San Jose

After years of reading rave reviews of this homegrown Vietnamese pop-up, I had my first Hết Sẩy experience at San Jose’s new Story Road Night Market — easily the most night market-y night market I’ve been to in the Bay. And Hết Sẩy’s offerings were the best dishes we ate all night: the flaky little curry-chicken hand pie, fragrant with lemongrass, and most delicious of all, the pork ribs, grilled over a charcoal fire that one of Hết Sẩy’s chefs tended to lovingly with a bamboo fan so that the entire mall parking lot was suffused with the seductive smell of charred meat. Old-school cooking! The ribs were impossibly succulent and savory, topped with a bright and funky fish sauce and calamansi dressing that lingered on my fingers deliciously for the rest of the night.

10. Yellow eel claypot rice at Taishan Cuisine

781 Broadway, San Francisco

Another Midnight Diners fave, Taishan Cuisine is a repository of homey, comforting Toisan dishes — the cuisine of San Francisco’s earliest Chinese immigrants. Of particular note: the yellow eel claypot rice (or any of the other claypot rice dishes, really), which glistens with the uber-aromatic sheen of rendered fish fat. I loved breaking off shards of the crispy, toasty rice crust at the bottom of the pot to eat over the course of the meal. To be able to enjoy such a dish at 3 a.m. on any night of the week? What a dream.