Soup Dumpling in the serving spoons

I ended up going to Fang Restaurant because it was close to the Cartoon Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but it turns out this is not a good enough reason to go to this restaurant.  Fang is in the SOMA district which is home to a lot technology companies, as a result there were fair number of tech guys wearing executive hoodies, loudly talking shop.  I learned that being a direct report to founders of start-ups is no fun and there was a lot of gossip about which founding partners will be forced out of various tech companies during the next round of investments.  On the plus side Fang has a full bar.

The Dumplings:  I tried the soup dumplings and the pork pot stickers with peanut sauce, both were disappointing.  The pork and cabbage filled pot-stickers were not actually cooked pot-sticker style but were instead deep fried.  In terms of presentation the pot-stickers looked they were hurled onto the plate with the peanut sauce sloshed on top of them.  The six soup dumplings were served each nestled in their own Chinese soup spoon with a squirt of dipping sauce pre-applied to each dumpling.  The soup dumplings were bland and low on soup content and the only flavor came from the sickly sweet sauce.

Deep fried pot stickers

The Dipping Sauce:  The peanut sauce was a lightly sweet sauce with a modest amount of spice and mild peanut flavor – basically inoffensive.  The sauce on top of the soup dumplings was a heavily sweetened black vinegar sauce with wedges of ginger.  It looked like the mandolin used to slice the ginger was on the “french fry” setting and had a dull blade.

The Location:  Fang is in the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood near the art museums and convention center.