Fat Cat x The Mantis Is Serving Up the Most Exciting Vietnamese Food in SF
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.
Fat Cat x The Mantis sounds like one of those deep-cut comic book crossovers — a collector’s edition for anyone who’s ever wondered how two of their favorite super-villains might fare against each other in an intergalactic fist fight.
If you’re a food lover in San Francisco, however, the real Fat Cat x The Mantis is something even better, and perhaps just as surprising: a wildly creative Vietnamese American restaurant (The Mantis) that shares a space in Bernal Heights with one of the city’s friendliest and most accessible new wine bars (Fat Cat).
It’s a roommate situation that came about in part because of mundane San Francisco reasons (i.e. “it’s so damn expensive out here”). But the collaboration really works. The restaurant is serving some of the most thrilling, delicious Vietnamese food we’ve had in SF, and makes for one of the city’s most enjoyable late-night (ish) dining experiences.
To be clear, the wine bar isn’t necessarily oriented for the extreme night owl: The kitchen closes at 10 p.m., and servers usually put out a last call for food orders at around 9:30. Still, the bar itself is open until 11 on weekends, and during our visit, plenty of diners were still polishing off the last bites of their dessert at well past 10.
The moment we pull up on a recent Friday night, we get a clear sense of the aesthetic. Unlike the bulk of the city’s trendy bars, Fat Cat eschews dim mood lighting in favor of a cheerfully bright, pink-and-mint-green living room vibe. A bandana mounted on the wall depicts a skateboarding, rice-paddy-hat-wearing granny pulling an ollie. The chopstick caddy on our table features a photo of Tuan An, aka “the Vietnamese Boy George,” the flamboyantly coiffed icon from the ’80s and ’90s heyday of the Vietnamese New Wave music scene.
The food straddles a similar line between nostalgia and envelope-pushing. We’d been fans of chef Kevin Tang’s inventive Vietnamese American cooking since his days at Viridian in Oakland. At first glance, the menu at The Mantis doesn’t read as especially Vietnamese. The dishes all sound like something you might find at a French wine bistro, with one or two Vietnamese ingredients added to every dish. There’s pâté, oysters on the half shell, a crudo, a big platter of steak frites.
All it took was our first slurp of a Miyagi oyster, though, for us to be astounded by just how distinctly Vietnamese — and also how new and unexpected — the food tasted. Each oyster came topped with a tangle of crispy fried shallots, a shiso leaf, diced pluot and, most amazing, a dab of green muối ớt xanh — a zippy, salsa-like sauce made by blending green chilies, lime leaves and sweet condensed milk that Vietnamese restaurants often serve with grilled seafood. Paired with the briny salinity of the raw oysters, the combination of flavors and textures were a delightful shock to our taste buds.
Dish after dish elicited a similar reaction. Ricotta and bún riêu tomato jam (!) spread on good sourdough. Confit chicken and taro croquettes topped with slivers of fish sauce–laced green mango, served over a smear of calamansi-chili aioli. (That one was like a Viet-coded take on dim sum taro dumplings. Or, as the table next to ours enthused, “like an egg roll and a crab cake had a son.”)
Meanwhile, a plate of fried eggplant came with butterbean miso, whipped tofu, Sungold tomatoes, Thai basil and lemongrass chili jam, according to the menu description. Just reading the list of ingredients set our heads to spinning. But once we bit in, we were sold. The eggplant was astonishingly crunchy on the outside, soft and creamy on the inside. Taken all together, the sweetness of the tomatoes, the creaminess of the tofu, and the subtle heat of the chili jam made for the perfect bite. We immediately declared the dish our favorite.
Our favorite, that is, until the server brought out the steak frites. This is the chef’s take on bò kho, or Vietnamese-style beef stew: thick slices of medium-rare strip loin drenched in a pool of velvety beef gravy that was so addictively savory, it begged for a big bowl of white rice (which our server was happy to supply). The dish is emblematic of the cooking at The Mantis — at once deeply nostalgic and like nothing you’ve had before. We couldn’t stop thinking about it — and that’s even before accounting for the side of extra-crispy, extra-fluffy double-fried Kennebec potato fries, which were amazing in their own right.
Service, meanwhile, was universally warm and enthusiastic. Never before have we received so much affirmation for ordering a Diet Coke — the ideal beverage to pair with Vietnamese food, we posited. (“Fucking bomb!” our server agreed.) On the night of our visit, the bar was packed from end to end, with diners and bar patrons spread out between the bar counter and the cluster of leather banquettes in the back. (There’d been a two-hour wait to get a seat a couple hours before we arrived, our server told us.)
The crowd skews a little bit young and maybe half Asian, and everyone’s a little smooshed together so it’s easy to wind up striking up conversations with your neighbors. Like us, the group of twenty- or thirty-somethings at the table next to ours had ordered nearly everything on the menu, so we spent the evening exchanging rave reviews and, at the end, a round of high fives. We’d been on something of a journey together, it felt like. And we couldn’t wait to do it again.
Fat Cat x The Mantis is open for dinner service Friday to Monday 5–10 p.m. at 3215 Mission St. in San Francisco. Last call for food orders is typically at around 9:30 p.m. The wine bar itself is open until 11 p.m. on weekends, and serves hot dogs and cheese plates when The Mantis isn’t open. On Sundays and Mondays, The Mantis also offers a $75 tasting menu option. Walk-ins only.