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"title": "How Garlic Noodles Became One of the Bay Area’s Most Iconic Foods",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f I were to put together a catalogue of quintessential Bay Area foods, I would include all of the usual suspects: the Mission burrito. Cioppino. The It’s-It. Maybe even the long-scorned clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But though it’s rarely mentioned in these kinds of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13900274/hitting-the-road-and-building-a-northern-california-bucket-list\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">bucket list\u003c/span>\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.7x7.com/100-things-to-do-in-san-francisco-1781694627.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">compilations\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, I’d also be hard-pressed to leave off a cult favorite whose fandom spans multiple cultures and cuisines—all united by their mutual love of butter, garlic and a nice hit of good old-fashioned MSG. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m talking, of course, about garlic noodles. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most closely associated with nostalgic Vietnamese seafood joints in San Francisco like \u003ca href=\"http://www.thanhlongsf.com/\">Thanh Long\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.ppqcrab.com/\">PPQ Dungeness Island\u003c/a>, the butter-soaked dish has a luxurious, over-the-top deliciousness that’s hard to match. Even more than that, the dish is emblematic of a whole generation of cooks who grew up in the multiethnic Bay Area, eating tacos and lumpia and Vietnamese roast crab, adapting all of those flavors into their own cuisine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To wit: I have ordered garlic noodles off of a Filipino food truck. I’ve had them served as a side dish for a brisket plate at a \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/burmabear/\">Burmese barbecue restaurant\u003c/a>. And, perhaps most strikingly, I’ve seen them on the menu at just about every hot new soul food pop-up that’s blown up in the past year or two. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here in the Bay Area, Asian Americans love garlic noodles. Black and Latino folks love garlic noodles. Indeed, once you start looking for garlic noodles, it seems, you find them everywhere. They’re one of the most popular dishes at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://bougcali.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Boug Cali\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Tiffany Carter’s “West Coast Creole” food stall at the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13895067/la-cocina-municipal-marketplace-food-hall-opening-tenderloin\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">La Cocina marketplace\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And they are the foundation of the menu at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.noodlebelly.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Noodle Belly\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a new restaurant adjacent to the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, where everything from crispy pork belly to Taiwanese-Peruvian popcorn chicken comes served over a tangle of the slick umami-packed noodles.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The story, then, of how a noodle dish born and popularized within San Francisco’s Vietnamese community—a product of immigrant ingenuity—spread across culinary borders to become one of the region’s most iconic foods is a uniquely Bay Area tale.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As Boug Cali’s Carter puts it, “Garlic noodles are Bay Area as burritos or Dutch Crunch sandwiches.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900945\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900945\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A plate piled high with garlic noodles on a table, in front of a plate of whole roast crab.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1706\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The iconic garlic noodles and roast crab at Thanh Long, the Vietnamese crab spot in the Outer Sunset. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[dropcap]O[/dropcap]f course no single restaurant or cuisine can lay claim to the idea of serving garlic and noodles together—that magical combination that forms the base for everything from Italian spaghetti aglio e olio to Chinese zhajiang mian. But Bay Area garlic noodle enthusiasts all seem to agree that the local take on the dish traces its origins to one of San Francisco’s very first Vietnamese restaurants: \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://www.thanhlongsf.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanh Long\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tiny Outer Sunset spot was being run as an Italian deli when Diana An, a wealthy Vietnamese traveler passing through San Francisco, bought it on a whim in 1970. Fearful of the ongoing war back home, An wound up staying to run the restaurant, gradually adding a handful of Vietnamese-inspired dishes like the roast Dungeness crab that eventually became its claim to fame. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[pullquote size=\"large\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Tiffany Carter of Boug Cali\"]“Garlic noodles are Bay Area as burritos or Dutch Crunch sandwiches.”[/pullquote]But it wasn’t until the rest of the An family arrived in San Francisco as refugees in 1975—and after Diana’s daughter-in-law, Helene An, took over the kitchen—that Thanh Long became a full-on Vietnamese restaurant. In the 2016 cookbook that she co-wrote, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.runningpress.com/titles/helene-an/an-to-eat/9780762458356/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">An: To Eat\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Helene writes, “All we had left in the world was the strange, small Italian deli.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900977\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1163px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900977\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s.jpg\" alt=\"Diana An (left) poses with her cousins outside her restaurant Thanh Long, circa 1975. \" width=\"1163\" height=\"1378\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s.jpg 1163w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s-800x948.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s-1020x1209.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s-160x190.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s-768x910.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1163px) 100vw, 1163px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Diana An (left) poses for a photo in front of her restaurant, Thanh Long, circa 1975. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the An family)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Helene’s daughter Monique An, who now manages Thanh Long, recalls that her mother came up with the recipe for the garlic noodles sometime around 1978, having noticed how much her American customers loved pasta—especially, as Helene writes in the book, “pastas laden with cream and butter.” She set out to create a noodle dish that would be “healthier” (because of all of the garlic, if nothing else) and more appealing to her own Asian sensibilities.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It wasn’t a typical Vietnamese dish,” Monique An says of the noodles. “[My mother] had a lot of French and European influences.” Indeed, An says, the style of garlic noodles that Helene began preparing at Thanh Long didn’t exist in Vietnam. It was Vietnamese American fusion food through and through—or “Euro-Asian,” as the Ans have phrased it in the restaurant’s marketing copy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Andrea Nguyen, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/115191/the-pho-cookbook-interview-with-andrea-nguyen\">cookbook author and Vietnamese food expert\u003c/a>, says she does remember eating \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/dining/umami-noodles-recipe.html\">something similar in Vietnam\u003c/a> when she was a kid—a simple dish of noodles, garlic, Maggi seasoning and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2014/12/bretel-butter-beurre-bretel-cannned.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">cultured butter from a can\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that she would make for herself after school. According to Nguyen, Thanh Long’s garlic noodles are like that dish “put on steroids,” especially when paired with the restaurant’s roast crab. “You’ve got the funk of the crab—the fattiness of it, the richness of it, the brininess—combined with butter, garlic, MSG [from the Maggi seasoning] and oyster sauce,” Nguyen says. “All of those things put together, it becomes this incredibly over-the-top dish that is special.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanh Long’s exact recipe remains shrouded in secrecy, even as restaurants all over the Bay Area have created very similar versions of the dish. Famously, the Ans don’t allow anyone outside of the family to cook the noodles (or other signature items like roast crab), instead prepping them in a secret kitchen tucked inside the main kitchen. And the garlic noodles are a glaring omission from the aforementioned An family cookbook.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900947\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900947\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A server picks up a plate of garlic noodles and a whole Dungeness crab from Thanh Long's hidden kitchen inside the main kitchen.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A server picks up an order from inside Thanh Long’s secret kitchen, where family members prepare the garlic noodles and roast Dungeness crab. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ambitious home cooks can, of course, find dozens of copycat recipes circulating on the internet. Almost all of them have the same basic components that Nguyen enumerates: butter, garlic and oyster sauce—often Maggi seasoning and sometimes a bit of Parmesan cheese as well. Monique An says she has tried following some of those recipes herself and thought they turned out well, even if they aren’t “quite the same.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“My mom lost everything two or three times in her life. She said she learned that everything you possess, like all your riches or jewels—you could lose all that,” An explains. “And so she protected that recipe. She said you can lose everything but your knowledge; that’s kind of her gift to us.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Indeed, An says, the family was worried that they were going to lose everything yet again this past year, as their \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://www.houseofan.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">restaurant group\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">—which now spans six locations in the Bay Area and Southern California—struggled through the pandemic.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One thing that helped keep the businesses afloat? They sold an awful lot of takeout garlic noodles.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900946\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900946\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A customer wearing a plastic bib prepares to dig in to a plate of garlic noodles.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The garlic noodles at Thanh Long are the highlight of a multi-course crab feast. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hanh Long’s garlic noodles were a hit with customers from the beginning, but as Monique An tells it, the dish didn’t really become a phenomenon until the early ’90s. By that point, the Ans had opened Crustacean, a more upscale spinoff of Thanh Long on Polk Street featuring the same crab, the same noodles. The turning point, An says, was in December of 1991, when \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">San Jose Mercury News \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">food critic David Beck penned a glowing (if slightly unhinged) review of the restaurant with the headline, “Garlic Noodles Worth Marrying For.” “By the third forkful of Helene An’s garlic noodles I had a plan,” the review begins. “I would divorce my companion, marry An, get the recipe, divorce \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">her\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and remarry companion No. 1.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As Thanh Long’s popularity soared, it drew a diverse customer base—Russians and Filipinos and a wide range of other Asian Americans. The restaurant also \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/For-generations-Thanh-Long-in-San-Francisco-s-14999095.php\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">became especially beloved by the Bay Area’s African American communities\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">—a trend An started noticing when she worked as a server there while still in high school, during the ’80s. It didn’t hurt that celebrities like Danny Glover became regulars. Eddie Murphy came through for a meal during the height of his popularity.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[pullquote size=\"large\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Monique An\"]“My mom lost everything two or three times in her life…And so she protected that recipe.”[/pullquote]More than that, though, Thanh Long became something of a status restaurant for everyday Black San Franciscans. It was the place folks would save up their money for when they wanted to celebrate a birthday or graduation. Boug Cali’s Tiffany Carter remembers being in middle school in the ’90s when her mother started bringing home Thanh Long’s garlic noodles anytime she passed through the Outer Sunset—excursions that were surprisingly frequent considering that, along with much of San Francisco’s Black population, Carter’s family lived all the way on the opposite side of town in Bayview-Hunters Point. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nevertheless, at least within their community, Thanh Long was simply the hottest restaurant around back then. “If you ate at Thanh Long, you were baller status,” Carter says. “It’s still like that to this day.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900952\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900952\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A portrait of chef Edward Wooley outside of Oakland's Au Lounge, where he holds his pop-up, Chef Smelly's Creole and Soul Food\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1706\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chef Edward Wooley stands outside Oakland’s Au Lounge, where he holds his Chef Smelly’s pop-up. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because the crab was expensive, it wasn’t a restaurant where regular folks could eat all the time. Edward Wooley, whose popular soul food business, \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/chefsmelly/?hl=en\">Smelly’s Creole and Soul Food\u003c/a>, is \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/The-legend-of-Chef-Smelly-and-Oakland-s-most-11191382.php\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">legendary in the Oakland pop-up scene\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, says he remembers that while growing up in East Oakland, it was mostly only “people hustling in the streets” who would have the money to get dressed up to go out for crab and garlic noodles. But the one meal he did eat at Crustacean, on Polk Street, in 1997 made a lasting impression.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I had the garlic noodles with the prawns,” Wooley says. “It was very, very memorable.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, when Wooley started his pop-up and catering business, it made sense that he’d eventually create his own version. One Valentine’s Day, back in 2013 or 2014, a catering customer asked if Wooley could make four plates of roast crab and garlic noodles—in part to save him a trip to Crustacean. At that point, Wooley had already been tinkering with his own garlic noodle recipe for years, developing a sweeter version made with fresh noodles and even more garlic than you might expect. He added it to the menu and people “went crazy for it” right away, Wooley says. Now, the noodles come with almost every combo plate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900954\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900954\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Chef Edward Wooley tosses a batch of garlic noodles in a large metal bowl. \" width=\"2560\" height=\"1706\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wooley tosses a batch of garlic noodles to distribute the buttery, garlicky sauce just right. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the spirit of Crustacean and Thanh Long, Wooley’s pop-ups also offer the kind of over-the-top experience that people save up their money for—to celebrate special occasions with, say, a huge, heaping seafood platter for two that comes loaded over a whopping two pounds of garlic noodles. (Regulars know that carrying one of Chef Smelly’s hefty takeout boxes home is a workout in itself.) \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“My business is soul fusion,” Wooley says. “I take my Black seasonings and style, and mix it with the Asian cuisine. It’s a blend of everything.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Carter, on the other hand, says the version she makes at \u003ca href=\"https://bougcali.com/\">Boug Cali\u003c/a> is more of a straightforward homage. She uses oyster sauce, Maggi and Parmesan, and infuses fresh Gilroy garlic into the butter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900971\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13900971 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-800x1038.jpg\" alt=\"Boug Cali chef Tiffany Carter takes a selfie in the kitchen.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1038\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-800x1038.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-1020x1323.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-160x208.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-768x996.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255.jpg 1171w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tiffany Carter has been eating Thanh Long’s garlic noodles since she was a kid. \u003ccite>(Tiffany Carter)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“She is the queen of garlic noodles,” Carter says of Helene An. “To this day, everyone is trying to make their garlic noodles stand up to Thanh Long.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Garlic noodles were one of the very first things Carter served when she started her business in 2010, and she says they remain her most requested item—especially among her Black customers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The dish’s popularity within the Bay Area’s Black communities, specifically, helps explain why you’ll find it on the menu at so many of the region’s buzziest soul food spots—Smelly’s, Boug Cali, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13895209/vegan-mob-oakland-mission-sf-expansion-food-truck-toriano-gordon-senor-sisig-vegano\">Vegan Mob\u003c/a>. Scroll through Instagram to find the most sought after informal soul food pop-ups in the area—folks selling out of their driveway or from the back of their pickup truck—and chances are, they’ll have garlic noodles on the menu too.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For Carter, garlic noodles are emblematic of the way she likes to cook, as someone who was raised on Southern soul food traditions but also grew up eating all of the different foods of the Bay Area. Boug Cali mixes all of those traditions: It serves jerk chicken tacos. It serves po’boys on Dutch Crunch bread.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“For us, Black people in California, we get asked, ‘Why are you not making soul food?’” Carter says. “This \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">is\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> soul food for us. It’s different from our grandparents’ generation. You’re going to find garlic noodles; you’re going to find Mexican food.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By this point, then, garlic noodles have become a true crossover hit in the Bay Area—a food whose deliciousness and popularity far transcend the borders of the community where it originated, in the same way that other local staples like tacos, burritos and lumpia have been universally embraced. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Everyone is so pressed on authenticity,” Carter says. “Our generation is not going to have a cookout without garlic noodles. Ten out of ten, that’s what they want.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900955\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900955\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Overhead view of a plate of garlic noodles and roast crab.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-2048x1366.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of Chef Smelly’s legendary seafood plates, piled high with garlic noodles. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hat kind of multicultural spirit is the driving force behind Noodle Belly, a new garlic noodle–centric restaurant in Oakland’s Fruitvale District specializing in “Bay Area comfort food.” One co-owner, Eugene Lee, is Korean American; the other, Kevyn Miyata, is Japanese American. Chef Jorge Concha (formerly of Camino) is Peruvian American.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The menu reflects that cultural mix: Asian-inflected crispy pork belly and popcorn chicken with Peruvian chile-lime accents. And every plate comes on a base of garlic noodles—an especially delicious butter-slicked version, with the fresh noodles cooked just right so they’re tender but also crisp at the edges. Even eaten with just a simple side of roasted mushrooms, they’re almost unspeakably luxurious.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The restaurant’s \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.noodlebelly.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">mix-and-match menu\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> speaks to another aspect of garlic noodles’ appeal: The earthy, deeply savory combination of butter, garlic and other umami-laden ingredients goes well with so many different types of food, whether you’re talking roast crab, Cajun blackened fish or Chinese-style slow-braised pork belly.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900951\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900951\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Saucy garlic noodles are mixed with a pair of tongs at Noodle Belly.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-1020x637.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-768x480.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-1536x960.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-2048x1280.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-1920x1200.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Saucy garlic noodles are the foundation of the menu at Noodle Belly, a new restaurant in Fruitvale. \u003ccite>(Noodle Belly)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lee, for his part, subscribes to the “secret sauce” school of garlic noodle making (which is to say that all of the kitchen staff have to sign nondisclosure agreements to safeguard the recipe’s exact ingredients and proportions). But without question, Lee says, the inspiration is Thanh Long, whose story he has loved ever since he first heard about it as a kid growing up in San Francisco in the ’80s—the tale of a refugee family taking cooking techniques and ingredients from Vietnam and making them palatable for an American audience. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It makes me so proud as a Bay Area resident and an Asian American,” Lee says.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eventually, Lee’s restaurant will help anchor a 3,000-square-foot commissary kitchen called Korner, adjacent to a large courtyard where customers can enjoy their meals. The whole enterprise will be geared toward highlighting minority-owned businesses. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[aside postID='arts_13898909,arts_13895488,arts_13895067']As for Noodle Belly itself, Lee hopes the restaurant can play a part in helping garlic noodles gain an even bigger audience. After all, Lee says, what was the last Bay Area-specific food product that made it big on the national stage? \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11816328/birth-of-rice-a-roni-the-armenian-italian-treat\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Probably Rice-a-Roni\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. “Garlic noodles are going to be the next big thing,” he says.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In fact, the Noodle Belly team had Rice-a-Roni on their mind when they developed one of their newest products: a take-home kit version of their signature garlic noodles—everything you need to make a fresh batch at home in about ten minutes flat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Of course it wouldn’t be accurate to say that garlic noodles only exist in the Bay Area. You can find something akin to the Thanh Long style fairly easily in Houston and Los Angeles and Louisiana—anywhere, really, that has a large Vietnamese population. Anyone with an internet connection can look up a recipe that comes pretty close.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But it is also true that garlic noodles don’t appear to have taken off to the same extent, or crossed over outside the Vietnamese American community in the same way, anywhere else in the country. Nowhere else do you see as diverse a range of people cooking and eating garlic noodles. And there isn’t any other city or region that claims garlic noodles as its own unique, iconic dish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900953\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900953\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Customers enjoy cocktails and heaping seafood platters at the Chef Smelly's pop-up.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">So many of the Bay Area’s different communities come together to enjoy a plate of garlic noodles at Chef Smelly’s. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I think it’s a very Bay Area thing,” says Andrea Nguyen, the cookbook author. And ultimately, she says, it’s easy to understand why the dish has caught on the way it has—and why, right now in 2021, it is in many ways the perfect dish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It’s that spirit of over-the-top. It’s that spirit of living large, of partying and having a good time,” Nguyen says. “During this late pandemic situation, what do we want to eat? We want to eat garlic noodles.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">No disrespect, then, to the burrito lover or the It’s-It connoisseur. If I ever find myself feeling homesick for the Bay, you’ll find me over here with a big plate of garlic noodles with roast crab, or blackened catfish, or smoked brisket. What could be more Bay Area than that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“People were inspired to create their own version,” Nguyen says of the dish’s proliferation throughout the Bay. “I think that’s a beautiful American thing.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12904247\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"39\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-160x16.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-240x23.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-375x37.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Born at Thanh Long in the Outer Sunset, the dish’s popularity now spans multiple Bay Area cultures and cuisines.",
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"title": "How Garlic Noodles Became One of the Bay Area’s Most Iconic Foods | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">I\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>f I were to put together a catalogue of quintessential Bay Area foods, I would include all of the usual suspects: the Mission burrito. Cioppino. The It’s-It. Maybe even the long-scorned clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But though it’s rarely mentioned in these kinds of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13900274/hitting-the-road-and-building-a-northern-california-bucket-list\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">bucket list\u003c/span>\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.7x7.com/100-things-to-do-in-san-francisco-1781694627.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">compilations\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, I’d also be hard-pressed to leave off a cult favorite whose fandom spans multiple cultures and cuisines—all united by their mutual love of butter, garlic and a nice hit of good old-fashioned MSG. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m talking, of course, about garlic noodles. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most closely associated with nostalgic Vietnamese seafood joints in San Francisco like \u003ca href=\"http://www.thanhlongsf.com/\">Thanh Long\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.ppqcrab.com/\">PPQ Dungeness Island\u003c/a>, the butter-soaked dish has a luxurious, over-the-top deliciousness that’s hard to match. Even more than that, the dish is emblematic of a whole generation of cooks who grew up in the multiethnic Bay Area, eating tacos and lumpia and Vietnamese roast crab, adapting all of those flavors into their own cuisine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To wit: I have ordered garlic noodles off of a Filipino food truck. I’ve had them served as a side dish for a brisket plate at a \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/burmabear/\">Burmese barbecue restaurant\u003c/a>. And, perhaps most strikingly, I’ve seen them on the menu at just about every hot new soul food pop-up that’s blown up in the past year or two. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here in the Bay Area, Asian Americans love garlic noodles. Black and Latino folks love garlic noodles. Indeed, once you start looking for garlic noodles, it seems, you find them everywhere. They’re one of the most popular dishes at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://bougcali.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Boug Cali\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Tiffany Carter’s “West Coast Creole” food stall at the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13895067/la-cocina-municipal-marketplace-food-hall-opening-tenderloin\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">La Cocina marketplace\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And they are the foundation of the menu at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.noodlebelly.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Noodle Belly\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a new restaurant adjacent to the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, where everything from crispy pork belly to Taiwanese-Peruvian popcorn chicken comes served over a tangle of the slick umami-packed noodles.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The story, then, of how a noodle dish born and popularized within San Francisco’s Vietnamese community—a product of immigrant ingenuity—spread across culinary borders to become one of the region’s most iconic foods is a uniquely Bay Area tale.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As Boug Cali’s Carter puts it, “Garlic noodles are Bay Area as burritos or Dutch Crunch sandwiches.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900945\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900945\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A plate piled high with garlic noodles on a table, in front of a plate of whole roast crab.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1706\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/020_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The iconic garlic noodles and roast crab at Thanh Long, the Vietnamese crab spot in the Outer Sunset. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">O\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>f course no single restaurant or cuisine can lay claim to the idea of serving garlic and noodles together—that magical combination that forms the base for everything from Italian spaghetti aglio e olio to Chinese zhajiang mian. But Bay Area garlic noodle enthusiasts all seem to agree that the local take on the dish traces its origins to one of San Francisco’s very first Vietnamese restaurants: \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://www.thanhlongsf.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanh Long\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tiny Outer Sunset spot was being run as an Italian deli when Diana An, a wealthy Vietnamese traveler passing through San Francisco, bought it on a whim in 1970. Fearful of the ongoing war back home, An wound up staying to run the restaurant, gradually adding a handful of Vietnamese-inspired dishes like the roast Dungeness crab that eventually became its claim to fame. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>But it wasn’t until the rest of the An family arrived in San Francisco as refugees in 1975—and after Diana’s daughter-in-law, Helene An, took over the kitchen—that Thanh Long became a full-on Vietnamese restaurant. In the 2016 cookbook that she co-wrote, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.runningpress.com/titles/helene-an/an-to-eat/9780762458356/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">An: To Eat\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Helene writes, “All we had left in the world was the strange, small Italian deli.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900977\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1163px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900977\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s.jpg\" alt=\"Diana An (left) poses with her cousins outside her restaurant Thanh Long, circa 1975. \" width=\"1163\" height=\"1378\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s.jpg 1163w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s-800x948.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s-1020x1209.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s-160x190.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/thanh-long_exterior1970s-768x910.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1163px) 100vw, 1163px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Diana An (left) poses for a photo in front of her restaurant, Thanh Long, circa 1975. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the An family)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Helene’s daughter Monique An, who now manages Thanh Long, recalls that her mother came up with the recipe for the garlic noodles sometime around 1978, having noticed how much her American customers loved pasta—especially, as Helene writes in the book, “pastas laden with cream and butter.” She set out to create a noodle dish that would be “healthier” (because of all of the garlic, if nothing else) and more appealing to her own Asian sensibilities.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It wasn’t a typical Vietnamese dish,” Monique An says of the noodles. “[My mother] had a lot of French and European influences.” Indeed, An says, the style of garlic noodles that Helene began preparing at Thanh Long didn’t exist in Vietnam. It was Vietnamese American fusion food through and through—or “Euro-Asian,” as the Ans have phrased it in the restaurant’s marketing copy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Andrea Nguyen, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/115191/the-pho-cookbook-interview-with-andrea-nguyen\">cookbook author and Vietnamese food expert\u003c/a>, says she does remember eating \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/dining/umami-noodles-recipe.html\">something similar in Vietnam\u003c/a> when she was a kid—a simple dish of noodles, garlic, Maggi seasoning and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2014/12/bretel-butter-beurre-bretel-cannned.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">cultured butter from a can\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that she would make for herself after school. According to Nguyen, Thanh Long’s garlic noodles are like that dish “put on steroids,” especially when paired with the restaurant’s roast crab. “You’ve got the funk of the crab—the fattiness of it, the richness of it, the brininess—combined with butter, garlic, MSG [from the Maggi seasoning] and oyster sauce,” Nguyen says. “All of those things put together, it becomes this incredibly over-the-top dish that is special.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanh Long’s exact recipe remains shrouded in secrecy, even as restaurants all over the Bay Area have created very similar versions of the dish. Famously, the Ans don’t allow anyone outside of the family to cook the noodles (or other signature items like roast crab), instead prepping them in a secret kitchen tucked inside the main kitchen. And the garlic noodles are a glaring omission from the aforementioned An family cookbook.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900947\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900947\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A server picks up a plate of garlic noodles and a whole Dungeness crab from Thanh Long's hidden kitchen inside the main kitchen.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/004_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A server picks up an order from inside Thanh Long’s secret kitchen, where family members prepare the garlic noodles and roast Dungeness crab. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ambitious home cooks can, of course, find dozens of copycat recipes circulating on the internet. Almost all of them have the same basic components that Nguyen enumerates: butter, garlic and oyster sauce—often Maggi seasoning and sometimes a bit of Parmesan cheese as well. Monique An says she has tried following some of those recipes herself and thought they turned out well, even if they aren’t “quite the same.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“My mom lost everything two or three times in her life. She said she learned that everything you possess, like all your riches or jewels—you could lose all that,” An explains. “And so she protected that recipe. She said you can lose everything but your knowledge; that’s kind of her gift to us.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Indeed, An says, the family was worried that they were going to lose everything yet again this past year, as their \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://www.houseofan.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">restaurant group\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">—which now spans six locations in the Bay Area and Southern California—struggled through the pandemic.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One thing that helped keep the businesses afloat? They sold an awful lot of takeout garlic noodles.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900946\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900946\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A customer wearing a plastic bib prepares to dig in to a plate of garlic noodles.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/008_SanFrancisco_ThanhLong_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The garlic noodles at Thanh Long are the highlight of a multi-course crab feast. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">T\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>hanh Long’s garlic noodles were a hit with customers from the beginning, but as Monique An tells it, the dish didn’t really become a phenomenon until the early ’90s. By that point, the Ans had opened Crustacean, a more upscale spinoff of Thanh Long on Polk Street featuring the same crab, the same noodles. The turning point, An says, was in December of 1991, when \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">San Jose Mercury News \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">food critic David Beck penned a glowing (if slightly unhinged) review of the restaurant with the headline, “Garlic Noodles Worth Marrying For.” “By the third forkful of Helene An’s garlic noodles I had a plan,” the review begins. “I would divorce my companion, marry An, get the recipe, divorce \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">her\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and remarry companion No. 1.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As Thanh Long’s popularity soared, it drew a diverse customer base—Russians and Filipinos and a wide range of other Asian Americans. The restaurant also \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/For-generations-Thanh-Long-in-San-Francisco-s-14999095.php\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">became especially beloved by the Bay Area’s African American communities\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">—a trend An started noticing when she worked as a server there while still in high school, during the ’80s. It didn’t hurt that celebrities like Danny Glover became regulars. Eddie Murphy came through for a meal during the height of his popularity.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>More than that, though, Thanh Long became something of a status restaurant for everyday Black San Franciscans. It was the place folks would save up their money for when they wanted to celebrate a birthday or graduation. Boug Cali’s Tiffany Carter remembers being in middle school in the ’90s when her mother started bringing home Thanh Long’s garlic noodles anytime she passed through the Outer Sunset—excursions that were surprisingly frequent considering that, along with much of San Francisco’s Black population, Carter’s family lived all the way on the opposite side of town in Bayview-Hunters Point. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nevertheless, at least within their community, Thanh Long was simply the hottest restaurant around back then. “If you ate at Thanh Long, you were baller status,” Carter says. “It’s still like that to this day.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900952\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900952\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A portrait of chef Edward Wooley outside of Oakland's Au Lounge, where he holds his pop-up, Chef Smelly's Creole and Soul Food\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1706\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/030_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chef Edward Wooley stands outside Oakland’s Au Lounge, where he holds his Chef Smelly’s pop-up. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because the crab was expensive, it wasn’t a restaurant where regular folks could eat all the time. Edward Wooley, whose popular soul food business, \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/chefsmelly/?hl=en\">Smelly’s Creole and Soul Food\u003c/a>, is \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/The-legend-of-Chef-Smelly-and-Oakland-s-most-11191382.php\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">legendary in the Oakland pop-up scene\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, says he remembers that while growing up in East Oakland, it was mostly only “people hustling in the streets” who would have the money to get dressed up to go out for crab and garlic noodles. But the one meal he did eat at Crustacean, on Polk Street, in 1997 made a lasting impression.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I had the garlic noodles with the prawns,” Wooley says. “It was very, very memorable.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, when Wooley started his pop-up and catering business, it made sense that he’d eventually create his own version. One Valentine’s Day, back in 2013 or 2014, a catering customer asked if Wooley could make four plates of roast crab and garlic noodles—in part to save him a trip to Crustacean. At that point, Wooley had already been tinkering with his own garlic noodle recipe for years, developing a sweeter version made with fresh noodles and even more garlic than you might expect. He added it to the menu and people “went crazy for it” right away, Wooley says. Now, the noodles come with almost every combo plate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900954\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900954\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Chef Edward Wooley tosses a batch of garlic noodles in a large metal bowl. \" width=\"2560\" height=\"1706\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/006_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wooley tosses a batch of garlic noodles to distribute the buttery, garlicky sauce just right. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the spirit of Crustacean and Thanh Long, Wooley’s pop-ups also offer the kind of over-the-top experience that people save up their money for—to celebrate special occasions with, say, a huge, heaping seafood platter for two that comes loaded over a whopping two pounds of garlic noodles. (Regulars know that carrying one of Chef Smelly’s hefty takeout boxes home is a workout in itself.) \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“My business is soul fusion,” Wooley says. “I take my Black seasonings and style, and mix it with the Asian cuisine. It’s a blend of everything.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Carter, on the other hand, says the version she makes at \u003ca href=\"https://bougcali.com/\">Boug Cali\u003c/a> is more of a straightforward homage. She uses oyster sauce, Maggi and Parmesan, and infuses fresh Gilroy garlic into the butter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900971\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13900971 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-800x1038.jpg\" alt=\"Boug Cali chef Tiffany Carter takes a selfie in the kitchen.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1038\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-800x1038.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-1020x1323.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-160x208.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255-768x996.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/BougCali_TiffanyCarter_crop-1-e1628569413255.jpg 1171w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tiffany Carter has been eating Thanh Long’s garlic noodles since she was a kid. \u003ccite>(Tiffany Carter)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“She is the queen of garlic noodles,” Carter says of Helene An. “To this day, everyone is trying to make their garlic noodles stand up to Thanh Long.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Garlic noodles were one of the very first things Carter served when she started her business in 2010, and she says they remain her most requested item—especially among her Black customers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The dish’s popularity within the Bay Area’s Black communities, specifically, helps explain why you’ll find it on the menu at so many of the region’s buzziest soul food spots—Smelly’s, Boug Cali, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13895209/vegan-mob-oakland-mission-sf-expansion-food-truck-toriano-gordon-senor-sisig-vegano\">Vegan Mob\u003c/a>. Scroll through Instagram to find the most sought after informal soul food pop-ups in the area—folks selling out of their driveway or from the back of their pickup truck—and chances are, they’ll have garlic noodles on the menu too.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For Carter, garlic noodles are emblematic of the way she likes to cook, as someone who was raised on Southern soul food traditions but also grew up eating all of the different foods of the Bay Area. Boug Cali mixes all of those traditions: It serves jerk chicken tacos. It serves po’boys on Dutch Crunch bread.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“For us, Black people in California, we get asked, ‘Why are you not making soul food?’” Carter says. “This \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">is\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> soul food for us. It’s different from our grandparents’ generation. You’re going to find garlic noodles; you’re going to find Mexican food.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By this point, then, garlic noodles have become a true crossover hit in the Bay Area—a food whose deliciousness and popularity far transcend the borders of the community where it originated, in the same way that other local staples like tacos, burritos and lumpia have been universally embraced. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Everyone is so pressed on authenticity,” Carter says. “Our generation is not going to have a cookout without garlic noodles. Ten out of ten, that’s what they want.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900955\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900955\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Overhead view of a plate of garlic noodles and roast crab.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-2048x1366.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/016_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of Chef Smelly’s legendary seafood plates, piled high with garlic noodles. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">T\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>hat kind of multicultural spirit is the driving force behind Noodle Belly, a new garlic noodle–centric restaurant in Oakland’s Fruitvale District specializing in “Bay Area comfort food.” One co-owner, Eugene Lee, is Korean American; the other, Kevyn Miyata, is Japanese American. Chef Jorge Concha (formerly of Camino) is Peruvian American.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The menu reflects that cultural mix: Asian-inflected crispy pork belly and popcorn chicken with Peruvian chile-lime accents. And every plate comes on a base of garlic noodles—an especially delicious butter-slicked version, with the fresh noodles cooked just right so they’re tender but also crisp at the edges. Even eaten with just a simple side of roasted mushrooms, they’re almost unspeakably luxurious.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The restaurant’s \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.noodlebelly.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">mix-and-match menu\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> speaks to another aspect of garlic noodles’ appeal: The earthy, deeply savory combination of butter, garlic and other umami-laden ingredients goes well with so many different types of food, whether you’re talking roast crab, Cajun blackened fish or Chinese-style slow-braised pork belly.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900951\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900951\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Saucy garlic noodles are mixed with a pair of tongs at Noodle Belly.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-1020x637.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-768x480.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-1536x960.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-2048x1280.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/noodle-belly_crop-1920x1200.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Saucy garlic noodles are the foundation of the menu at Noodle Belly, a new restaurant in Fruitvale. \u003ccite>(Noodle Belly)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lee, for his part, subscribes to the “secret sauce” school of garlic noodle making (which is to say that all of the kitchen staff have to sign nondisclosure agreements to safeguard the recipe’s exact ingredients and proportions). But without question, Lee says, the inspiration is Thanh Long, whose story he has loved ever since he first heard about it as a kid growing up in San Francisco in the ’80s—the tale of a refugee family taking cooking techniques and ingredients from Vietnam and making them palatable for an American audience. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It makes me so proud as a Bay Area resident and an Asian American,” Lee says.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eventually, Lee’s restaurant will help anchor a 3,000-square-foot commissary kitchen called Korner, adjacent to a large courtyard where customers can enjoy their meals. The whole enterprise will be geared toward highlighting minority-owned businesses. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>As for Noodle Belly itself, Lee hopes the restaurant can play a part in helping garlic noodles gain an even bigger audience. After all, Lee says, what was the last Bay Area-specific food product that made it big on the national stage? \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11816328/birth-of-rice-a-roni-the-armenian-italian-treat\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Probably Rice-a-Roni\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. “Garlic noodles are going to be the next big thing,” he says.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In fact, the Noodle Belly team had Rice-a-Roni on their mind when they developed one of their newest products: a take-home kit version of their signature garlic noodles—everything you need to make a fresh batch at home in about ten minutes flat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Of course it wouldn’t be accurate to say that garlic noodles only exist in the Bay Area. You can find something akin to the Thanh Long style fairly easily in Houston and Los Angeles and Louisiana—anywhere, really, that has a large Vietnamese population. Anyone with an internet connection can look up a recipe that comes pretty close.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But it is also true that garlic noodles don’t appear to have taken off to the same extent, or crossed over outside the Vietnamese American community in the same way, anywhere else in the country. Nowhere else do you see as diverse a range of people cooking and eating garlic noodles. And there isn’t any other city or region that claims garlic noodles as its own unique, iconic dish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13900953\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13900953\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Customers enjoy cocktails and heaping seafood platters at the Chef Smelly's pop-up.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/033_Oakland_ChefSmellys_08072021-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">So many of the Bay Area’s different communities come together to enjoy a plate of garlic noodles at Chef Smelly’s. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I think it’s a very Bay Area thing,” says Andrea Nguyen, the cookbook author. And ultimately, she says, it’s easy to understand why the dish has caught on the way it has—and why, right now in 2021, it is in many ways the perfect dish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It’s that spirit of over-the-top. It’s that spirit of living large, of partying and having a good time,” Nguyen says. “During this late pandemic situation, what do we want to eat? We want to eat garlic noodles.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">No disrespect, then, to the burrito lover or the It’s-It connoisseur. If I ever find myself feeling homesick for the Bay, you’ll find me over here with a big plate of garlic noodles with roast crab, or blackened catfish, or smoked brisket. What could be more Bay Area than that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“People were inspired to create their own version,” Nguyen says of the dish’s proliferation throughout the Bay. “I think that’s a beautiful American thing.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Oakland’s New Soul Food Restaurant Wants to Make Biscuit-Crust Pizza a Thing",
"headTitle": "Oakland’s New Soul Food Restaurant Wants to Make Biscuit-Crust Pizza a Thing | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Karter Louis couldn’t afford to go out for pizza when was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, so he and his brother would improvise: They took biscuit dough, straight out of the tube, and loaded it up with whatever toppings they had on hand. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, Louis is turning that simple idea into a bona fide restaurant. Located at the former Noodle Theory Provisions space in North Oakland, at 5849 San Pablo Ave., \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://soulslicepizza.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Soul Slice\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> will be a soul food restaurant first and foremost—a place for customers to enjoy collard greens and black-eyed peas, fried oysters and lemon pepper catfish. But Soul Slice’s main point of distinction is that it serves all those dishes and more on top of its proprietary biscuit crust. As a pizza, in other words. To Louis’s knowledge, it’s the first dedicated biscuit pizza restaurant anywhere in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The restaurant will open on Saturday, June 19, or Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States— a “dream day” to open, Louis says, because he sees the restaurant as a celebration of Black culture.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The goal,” he says, “is to glorify and bring more focus on the origins of African American cuisine.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[aside postID='arts_13895209,bayareabites_136360' label='More Soul Food']Louis, a self-described serial restaurateur, was an operating partner at San Francisco’s Samovar Tea Lounge in the mid to late aughts, after which he ran a chain of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/hillbilly-tea-louisville-kentucky/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Appalachia-themed restaurants called Hillbilly Tea\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> based in Louisville. His dream, however, was to open a soul food restaurant, especially as he learned more about this history of the cuisine over the years—about how \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://madfeed.co/2015/a-peoples-history-of-carolina-rice/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Carolina Gold rice was brought over to the U.S. in the pockets of enslaved West Africans\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/07/22/today-even-fancy-restaurants-serve-biscuits-and-gravy-but-the-dish-comes-from-modest-beginnings/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the way that biscuits themselves evolved\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> from hard, cracker-like objects eaten by British sailors to a staple of the American South. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For years, Louis had assumed that biscuit-crust pizza was just an odd thing that he had done as a child, but when he started talking to people about it as an adult, he realized that many Southern folks, in particular, had done the same thing growing up. Google “biscuit pizza,” and you’ll find several dozen recipes, though very few that incorporate any soul food ingredients. For Louis, however, the combination struck him as being “as American as you can get.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the end of the day, Louis says, Soul Slice is a pizza restaurant. The chef’s biscuit creations \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">look\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> like pizza; you cut it into slices and eat it like a pizza. The main difference is that the pizzas don’t draw on Italian or Italian American flavors. “We don’t have mozzarella in our profile whatsoever,” Louis says. “I don’t even think we have oregano.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instead, the \u003ca href=\"https://soulslicepizza.com/menu\">pizzas are mostly made up of the kinds of things you’ll find in the American South\u003c/a>. One pizza features okra, smashed potatoes, crispy black-eyed peas, mustard greens, collards and tomatoes. You can get hot links or cornmeal-crusted fried oysters on your pizza. You can get Alpine cheese, cheddar or a vegan cheese. And while there is a house tomato sauce, customers might instead choose the hot sauce or the “mac cheese” sauce, which Louis says captures the “gooey, cheesy essence” of his mac and cheese recipe. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13898946\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2016px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13898946\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra.jpg\" alt=\"Close-up of a pizza topped with okra and tomatoes.\" width=\"2016\" height=\"1512\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra.jpg 2016w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2016px) 100vw, 2016px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Okra and Tomato pizza. \u003ccite>(Soul Slice)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Louis says when he moved back to the Bay Area in 2017 after living abroad in China and Taiwan for several years, he wasn’t necessarily looking to open another restaurant. But then the pandemic hit, and Louis says he saw the ways the restaurant industry was ravaged—the way so many cooks and servers lost their jobs, or felt compelled to keep showing up to work at risk of their own health and safety: “I just asked myself, what can I do?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The same week he came up with the idea for Soul Slice, protests broke out all over the country in response to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white police officer, and Louis took that as a sign that focusing his efforts on celebrating Black food culture was the right thing to do.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“People don’t take into consideration the contributions that Black and brown people have made to this country,” he says. “This is an important cuisine to engage in.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13898944\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 373px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13898944\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_Karter.jpg\" alt=\"Headshot of Karter Louis smiling in glasses and a white collared shirt.\" width=\"373\" height=\"483\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_Karter.jpg 747w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_Karter-160x207.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 373px) 100vw, 373px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Karter Louis is a self-described serial entrepreneur. \u003ccite>(Soul Slice)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With all of the cracks in the restaurant industry’s existing business model that were exposed by the pandemic, Louis says he realized that he wanted to create a restaurant that would be more equitable and humane—no more nickel-and-diming employees for an hour here or there; no more elitist, fine-dining hierarchies where a server might make $100,000 a year while the dishwasher scrapes by on $30,000. “I’ve been a restaurant consultant, and I’ve trained people on how to cut costs—how to keep people in poverty, basically,” he says.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At Soul Slice, Louis says, every worker—a staff of seven to start out—will be a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://soulslicepizza.com/opportunities\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">full-time salaried employee\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with health benefits, paid vacation and a 401(k). Everyone will work in both the front and back of the house, and they’ll all be paid according to their training level. It’ll be a five-step scale, with the goal of getting everyone to at least the fourth level. As Louis puts it, “Everyone gets the same pay at the same level. Everyone shares the tips; everyone works a full day; everyone takes two days off. It’s like a real company. That was the dream.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once the restaurant opens, Louis says he’ll begin the process of applying to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/133593/why-some-wineries-are-becoming-certified-b-corp-and-what-that-means\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">have it certified\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> as a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://bcorporation.net/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">B Corp\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">—a business legally required to have a positive impact on both its workers and on the world at large. Eventually, he wants to open 20 outposts of Soul Slice all around the country in the next three to five years. But Oakland seemed like the perfect place to start.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I want to hang my hat on Oakland,” Louis says. “Oakland is the beacon to me in terms of being able to prove the model and having a community of people who understand what we’re trying to do.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12904247\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"39\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-160x16.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-240x23.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-375x37.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Soul Slice will open for both takeout and indoor dining on June 19 at 5849 San Pablo Ave. in Oakland. A back patio with outdoor seating will open later this summer. See the opening menu below:\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13898978\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"The first page of the Soul Slice menu.\" width=\"1978\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-scaled.jpg 1978w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-800x1035.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-1020x1320.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-160x207.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-768x994.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-1187x1536.jpg 1187w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-1583x2048.jpg 1583w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-1920x2485.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1978px) 100vw, 1978px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13898979\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"The second page of the Soul Slice menu.\" width=\"2130\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-scaled.jpg 2130w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-800x962.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-1020x1226.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-160x192.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-768x923.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-1278x1536.jpg 1278w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-1704x2048.jpg 1704w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-2-1920x2308.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2130px) 100vw, 2130px\">\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "At Soul Slice, pizza topping options will include hot links, fried chicken and collard greens.",
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"title": "Oakland’s New Soul Food Restaurant Wants to Make Biscuit-Crust Pizza a Thing | KQED",
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"headline": "Oakland’s New Soul Food Restaurant Wants to Make Biscuit-Crust Pizza a Thing",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Karter Louis couldn’t afford to go out for pizza when was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, so he and his brother would improvise: They took biscuit dough, straight out of the tube, and loaded it up with whatever toppings they had on hand. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, Louis is turning that simple idea into a bona fide restaurant. Located at the former Noodle Theory Provisions space in North Oakland, at 5849 San Pablo Ave., \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://soulslicepizza.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Soul Slice\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> will be a soul food restaurant first and foremost—a place for customers to enjoy collard greens and black-eyed peas, fried oysters and lemon pepper catfish. But Soul Slice’s main point of distinction is that it serves all those dishes and more on top of its proprietary biscuit crust. As a pizza, in other words. To Louis’s knowledge, it’s the first dedicated biscuit pizza restaurant anywhere in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The restaurant will open on Saturday, June 19, or Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States— a “dream day” to open, Louis says, because he sees the restaurant as a celebration of Black culture.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The goal,” he says, “is to glorify and bring more focus on the origins of African American cuisine.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Louis, a self-described serial restaurateur, was an operating partner at San Francisco’s Samovar Tea Lounge in the mid to late aughts, after which he ran a chain of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/hillbilly-tea-louisville-kentucky/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Appalachia-themed restaurants called Hillbilly Tea\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> based in Louisville. His dream, however, was to open a soul food restaurant, especially as he learned more about this history of the cuisine over the years—about how \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://madfeed.co/2015/a-peoples-history-of-carolina-rice/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Carolina Gold rice was brought over to the U.S. in the pockets of enslaved West Africans\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/07/22/today-even-fancy-restaurants-serve-biscuits-and-gravy-but-the-dish-comes-from-modest-beginnings/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the way that biscuits themselves evolved\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> from hard, cracker-like objects eaten by British sailors to a staple of the American South. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For years, Louis had assumed that biscuit-crust pizza was just an odd thing that he had done as a child, but when he started talking to people about it as an adult, he realized that many Southern folks, in particular, had done the same thing growing up. Google “biscuit pizza,” and you’ll find several dozen recipes, though very few that incorporate any soul food ingredients. For Louis, however, the combination struck him as being “as American as you can get.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the end of the day, Louis says, Soul Slice is a pizza restaurant. The chef’s biscuit creations \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">look\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> like pizza; you cut it into slices and eat it like a pizza. The main difference is that the pizzas don’t draw on Italian or Italian American flavors. “We don’t have mozzarella in our profile whatsoever,” Louis says. “I don’t even think we have oregano.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instead, the \u003ca href=\"https://soulslicepizza.com/menu\">pizzas are mostly made up of the kinds of things you’ll find in the American South\u003c/a>. One pizza features okra, smashed potatoes, crispy black-eyed peas, mustard greens, collards and tomatoes. You can get hot links or cornmeal-crusted fried oysters on your pizza. You can get Alpine cheese, cheddar or a vegan cheese. And while there is a house tomato sauce, customers might instead choose the hot sauce or the “mac cheese” sauce, which Louis says captures the “gooey, cheesy essence” of his mac and cheese recipe. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13898946\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2016px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13898946\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra.jpg\" alt=\"Close-up of a pizza topped with okra and tomatoes.\" width=\"2016\" height=\"1512\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra.jpg 2016w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_okra-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2016px) 100vw, 2016px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Okra and Tomato pizza. \u003ccite>(Soul Slice)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Louis says when he moved back to the Bay Area in 2017 after living abroad in China and Taiwan for several years, he wasn’t necessarily looking to open another restaurant. But then the pandemic hit, and Louis says he saw the ways the restaurant industry was ravaged—the way so many cooks and servers lost their jobs, or felt compelled to keep showing up to work at risk of their own health and safety: “I just asked myself, what can I do?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The same week he came up with the idea for Soul Slice, protests broke out all over the country in response to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white police officer, and Louis took that as a sign that focusing his efforts on celebrating Black food culture was the right thing to do.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“People don’t take into consideration the contributions that Black and brown people have made to this country,” he says. “This is an important cuisine to engage in.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13898944\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 373px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13898944\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_Karter.jpg\" alt=\"Headshot of Karter Louis smiling in glasses and a white collared shirt.\" width=\"373\" height=\"483\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_Karter.jpg 747w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/SoulSlice_Karter-160x207.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 373px) 100vw, 373px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Karter Louis is a self-described serial entrepreneur. \u003ccite>(Soul Slice)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With all of the cracks in the restaurant industry’s existing business model that were exposed by the pandemic, Louis says he realized that he wanted to create a restaurant that would be more equitable and humane—no more nickel-and-diming employees for an hour here or there; no more elitist, fine-dining hierarchies where a server might make $100,000 a year while the dishwasher scrapes by on $30,000. “I’ve been a restaurant consultant, and I’ve trained people on how to cut costs—how to keep people in poverty, basically,” he says.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At Soul Slice, Louis says, every worker—a staff of seven to start out—will be a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://soulslicepizza.com/opportunities\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">full-time salaried employee\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with health benefits, paid vacation and a 401(k). Everyone will work in both the front and back of the house, and they’ll all be paid according to their training level. It’ll be a five-step scale, with the goal of getting everyone to at least the fourth level. As Louis puts it, “Everyone gets the same pay at the same level. Everyone shares the tips; everyone works a full day; everyone takes two days off. It’s like a real company. That was the dream.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once the restaurant opens, Louis says he’ll begin the process of applying to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/133593/why-some-wineries-are-becoming-certified-b-corp-and-what-that-means\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">have it certified\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> as a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://bcorporation.net/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">B Corp\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">—a business legally required to have a positive impact on both its workers and on the world at large. Eventually, he wants to open 20 outposts of Soul Slice all around the country in the next three to five years. But Oakland seemed like the perfect place to start.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I want to hang my hat on Oakland,” Louis says. “Oakland is the beacon to me in terms of being able to prove the model and having a community of people who understand what we’re trying to do.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12904247\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"39\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-160x16.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-240x23.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39-375x37.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Soul Slice will open for both takeout and indoor dining on June 19 at 5849 San Pablo Ave. in Oakland. A back patio with outdoor seating will open later this summer. See the opening menu below:\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13898978\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"The first page of the Soul Slice menu.\" width=\"1978\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-scaled.jpg 1978w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-800x1035.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-1020x1320.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-160x207.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-768x994.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-1187x1536.jpg 1187w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-1583x2048.jpg 1583w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Soul-Slice-Menu-1920x2485.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1978px) 100vw, 1978px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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"title": "SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America",
"tagline": "A new future for housing",
"info": "Sold Out: Rethinking Housing in America",
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