Happy Chinese Restaurant

Great dim sum place! Located in SF Chinatown, this place is where old-school chinese folks go for real Dim Sum, my friend. The place looks old school, like it has been around for ages. The manager is a little old lady, who even gave us some free dim sum! The food is authentic. Served hot and fresh. Food is fresh because the place is always packed with customers so the food goes quickly and everything is made fresh. Definitely will go back!

Here food was delicious food and nice stuff. I was with a group of people, we were approximately 10 people. And ordered a lot of food. I didn't see a menu, I tried a lot of different foods. I really liked lobsters. Honestly, I expected a cheap price, but for me was the price for this cafe. But to compare with a super fancy restaurant, I tried here at least 6 main different dishes, in a restaurant, I could just have one drink and one dish. Inside the cafe, not fancy, just regular.

Decided to stop here after two other places we tried in China Town were super packed. So glad that we did. I was a little skeptical as it was fairly empty beside a few other tables. I was really wanting dim sum and did not see it on the menu so I asked the server. She was super nice and knew English and brought us all our favorite dim sum items, steam pork buns, dumplings, shumai and beef wrapped in rice noodle. Everything came out hot and fresh. Some of the best dumplings I've ever had. Would recommend if you don't want to wait at the super popular spots!

This is a regular spot for me to stop at when I go see my chinese doctor across the street. 80% of the time I get jook. Thousand year old egg with shredded pork is DELICIOUS. Not a fancy place, super casual but it's the best jook in Chinatown. They also have great steamed flat rice noodle sheets (a regular dim sum dish). And also The clay pot rice ! Those are the go to items for all locals.

This is a typical Chinatown local joint where they serve mainly locals. Come for the good food and excellent value... and not the service. This place is hustling and bustling during brunch/ lunch hours especially on weekends. They are famous for their: 1.) Jook or Congee. The best congee here is pork stomach w ginkgo nuts and bean curd congee... so good! Other congee selections are just as good - preserved egg with pork, minced beef congee... all yum! and super fresh. They make their congee batch daily and often sell out before 12pm/ 1pm. 2.) Rice noodles - plain rice noodles or wrapped with shrimp, beef, BBQ pork etc. They make all their noodles here fresh daily too. 3.) Turnip cake - or their turnip black eye pea cake. With green onion, dried shrimp... unique and again, made fresh daily. 3.) Clay pot rice - ask them to make it "more dry" and get the 'slight burnt' at the bottom of the clay pot for the rice ... if that suits your taste. Dinner tends to get slow here but we would come if we'd prefer a quieter dinner. Often we'll order a live fish from the tank and steam it (about $26 each) , plus a few other dishes and that's dinner! You can't go wrong with dinner at this local joint... good food always at great value. And, lunch is a slam dunk of you go with congee (jook) and rice noodles.

Happy Chinese Restaurant has been around in Chinatown for a while now. I remember going to it when it was a newer restaurant when I was in high school... and that was a loooong time ago. The restaurant is your typical dim sum place at lunch, but I would say serves up food that is above the average for San Francisco's Chinatown. I was surprised at how tasty and full of flavor some of my dishes were! Like many dim sum restaurants in Chinatown, Happy Chinese Restaurant serves its food on carts that roll around the dining room area. When the cart comes by you can select which item you'd like to have and the server will mark the menu with the appropriate price. Today I wanted to eat a bit lighter so we went easy on the ordering. Usually it's so easy to just eat with your eyes and ask for over the amount of food you can actually eat. We selected some bamboo leaf rice and some spinach wraps. The rice is a sticky rice that comes with Chinese sausage and a hard egg yolk. It was a decent item, but I've definitely had better versions of this elsewhere. During our lunch, this was probably the least impressive item we ordered... but I still enjoyed it. The spinach wraps were extremely tasty. After the rice item I was a bit skeptical, but each filled wrap was definitely hitting high notes in terms of flavorful punch - not too much... but just right. Aside from ordering from the cart, you can also special order other dishes like noodles or congee. Our family 99% of the time gets a noodle dish, but today was different. I felt like congee so we got some. Oh man... it was soooo good! Again, the flavor was there. We got a small bow (which was still pretty large) and finished it all up. I was surprised at just how much I enjoyed the congee here. In terms of service, everything was good for a Chinese restaurant. One of the ladies was quick to make sure I didn't forget my camera which was on the table. I appreciated that! The restaurant is pretty clean and bright. Happy Chinese Restaurant surprised me today, and I'd be happy to have it surprise me again when I return for my next visit.