Mama Go’s Serves the Best Late-Night Airport Food at SFO

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

We stepped off the airplane and onto the gleaming white Harvey Milk Terminal concourse with a rumbling in our stomachs and beef kaldereta on our minds.

It was nearly 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, when the options for late-night dining in San Francisco are even slimmer than usual. But we were lucky: We’d heard that Mama Go’s, located just outside our gate, serves its menu of home-style Filipino classics until 11:30 p.m. every night. As we soon learned, it’s probably the best restaurant in the entire airport.

We were hardly the only folks on our flight who made a beeline directly toward Mama Go’s, joining other travelers grabbing a quick bite before boarding their redeyes. The shared dining area encompassed a wide spectrum of late-night airport life: An off-shift ground crew member waited for his boba order. An older white guy in a neatly pressed dress shirt tucked a napkin bib into his collar, opened up the newspaper, and proceeded to dig into a big bowl of pancit bihon. A Gen Z Filipina absentmindedly picked at a plate of garlic rice while scrolling her phone.

The kiosk is set up similarly to the dozens of turo-turo (“point-point”) steam table restaurants you can find scattered throughout the Bay, except with slightly (but not outrageously) higher prices and a more tightly curated selection of pre-cooked dishes. During our visit, a couple of hours before close, the restaurant had sold out of a few a la carte offerings like its arroz caldo and grilled chicken skewers. In any case, the highlight of the menu at Mama Go’s by far is its array of homey, slow-cooked stews, which you can order as part of a two- or three-item combo plate for around $20 — easily the best bang for your buck.

Airport food or not, all of the meaty stews we tried were showstoppers, as comforting and compulsively eatable as anything you’d find at a Daly City or Vallejo neighborhood Filipino spot. Take that beef kaldereta, for instance. I’ve eaten slightly more elaborate versions made with oxtail and studded with green olives. But the airport kiosk’s take on the classic beef stew was as satisfying as any I’ve had — generous chunks of exquisitely tender meat, soft potatoes, and bell peppers in a rich, velvety brown gravy that tasted amazing over garlic rice. I could have eaten three bowls.

The Bicol express might have been even better. It featured cubes of tender, fatty pork bathed in a creamy coconut sauce with a surprising chili kick and a jolt of funky shrimp paste umami — the kind of flavor-packed dish I’d expect to find at a Filipino family potluck instead of just steps away from the airport’s children’s play area.

The restaurant also sells a very solid version of chicken adobo — boneless, skinless thigh meat to make things easier for the on-the-go crowd, but as lovingly slow-cooked as the other stews, with a bright vinegar tang that perked up our palates.

The combo plates all come with a side dish (we went with the cigar-shaped lumpia Shanghai, naturally), a choice of rice or noodles, and a bowl of sibuya soup topped with crispy onions that went soft after soaking up the clear, hot broth.

Mama Go’s claims to be the first Filipino restaurant to open at any airport in the United States, and there’s something so fitting and poetic about chicken adobo, garlic rice and lumpia being a traveler’s first and/or last taste of San Francisco. In fact, we only had a chance to experience one end of the restaurant’s late-night clutchness. Mama Go’s closes for just a few hours each night before opening again at 3:30 a.m. (!) to serve a full slate of Filipino breakfast dishes — silog plates with eggs, garlic rice, and your choice of grilled meat (or vegan patty) — to predawn travelers getting ready to board the earliest flights of the day. (When I flew back from the East Coast earlier this week, the prospect of a silog tempted me to not reschedule a flight that was delayed so much I would have landed at SFO after 3 a.m. Sadly, Mrs. Midnight Diners was not amused.)

What really makes Mama Go’s stand out, however, is the way it offers a counterpoint to the inhumanity of commercial airline travel today — the shrinking legroom and overhead compartments, the racial profiling, the fee-ification of every last aspect of the travel experience. Even at SFO, which has better food than the bulk of American airports, almost all of the options are blandly corporate to the utmost degree: fast-casual fried chicken ordered from a touch-screen, overpriced chain restaurant banh mi, or a celebrity chef’s 28th or 29th new pizza franchise.

Against that backdrop, a home-style meal from Mama Go’s feels particularly special. To be sure, the restaurant’s parent company has its own corporate hierarchy — but for now, at least, the SFO kiosk is the only location in the world. The staff is warm and welcoming. And there is something wonderful and incredibly human about eating a meal like this at the airport. Luxuriating in a hearty stew (or two or three) and a mound of garlic rice. Sipping from a bowl of hot broth between bites. Just taking a minute to breathe.

Mama Go’s Filipino Cuisine is open 3:30 a.m.–11:30 p.m. daily in Terminal 1 of the San Francisco International Airport, near Gate B18.