Since 2018, Gao Viet Kitchen & Bar has been a San Mateo Vietnamese favorite with long waitlists, no reservations and a 90-minute table limit during peak times. It’s also home to arguably the most expensive bowl of pho: $100 Phozilla with the cheeky menu tagline of “Nobody should spend this much $$ on any bowl of pho.”
Chef Viet Nguyen opened a San Francisco location in the Sunset District in December 2022. The waits, that sense of humor and the Phozilla are here, equalling three regular pho bowls in broth volume, supposedly weighing 5 lbs. The soup is loaded with a giant beef rib, 1.5 lb de-shelled Maine lobster, filet mignon, butter brisket and tendon, all simmering in a marrow-laden 24-hour broth with a side of butter chili sweet lobster dipping sauce. Ridiculous? You bet. Add on a shot of Suntory Toki Japanese whisky or tequila with marrow or regular pho broth chaser — plus optional sriracha, hoisin, lemon or jalapeño — and you have a champion’s meal.
Pho shot craziness steps it up with an “extra extra” option of a giant bone you can suck the marrow out of with a boba straw. Despite all this gimmicky-sounding, social media-worthy hype, I’m pleased to find — and would already claim — Gao Viet Kitchen & Bar is one of our best Vietnamese restaurants. And I’m a tough critic given my life-defining month in Vietnam in my youth just over 20 years ago and the decades of “real deal” Vietnamese food research since. And in California, we have the largest Vietnamese population in the Americas for decades. Nearby San Jose is the biggest Vietnamese population in any U.S. city with Orange County cities following, while SF and the entire Bay Area is home to a large Vietnamese population. So from my OC years to now, I’ve been blessed with a lifetime of authentic Vietnamese food from our vibrant community.
From SF’s longtime Little Saigon neighborhood downtown co-existing in the Tenderloin, to our plethora of banh mi, pho and crab-garlic noodle shops, San Francisco holds countless options for legit Vietnamese food. However, there is a shorter list of restaurants that serve the majority of my favorite Vietnamese dishes on one menu.
Though Gao Viet does not serve my all-time Vietnamese favorite, catfish claypot, they do serve many of my other favorites: bò tái chanh (beef carpaccio), bánh cuon (rice noodle rolls), bánh khot (mini pancakes), bò lúc lac (shaking beef), bun reiu co ba (vermicelli noodle soup) and bánh xeo wrap (Vietnamese crêpes).
While there is Blue Phoenix Vietnamese rice wine (a “Chef Viet favorite”), canned and bottled beer, grocery-store big name wines and a full bar, cocktails are of the Espresso Martini, Limoncello Spritz variety so not exactly of a cocktail geek’s destination, despite the care put into the drinks. The house bestseller is Holy Gao!, with vodka, oregano, ginger syrup, lime juice, cream of coconut and jalapeno. After seeing the wine list and with a $25 corkage fee, I opted to bring in my own wine bottles with my partner Dan (“The Renaissance Man”) and dear friends on a recent Friday night.
We were concerned about a long wait. Lines and no reservations are a pet peeve and something I usually avoid for more civilized eating, especially dining at/from over 10 places a week and squeezing in meals often twice a day in between traveling half of every month. I’d rather order takeout than wait in long lines or not be sure I am going to get a table.
But this particular Friday was our only free night and I wanted to go with a group given the large menu and portions. Thankfully, checking in on Gao Viet’s iPad waitlist, I got a 9–20 minute wait time estimate at 6pm. Taking a peek inside the split level space on busy Irving St., it was packed, but with a 4pm opening hour, tables were clearing out swiftly. I immediately found the staff were accommodating and helped us get seated promptly. We waited just about 20 minutes and dishes came out fast. As the meal went on, servers were friendly, upbeat and gracious.
But let’s talk food. I can’t exactly afford a $95 bowl of soup and Gao Viet press already out there are solely centered around this one dish. So I wanted to see what they did beyond hyped, expensive pho. I’m happy to tell you there is plenty worth going in for. Plus, among numerous versions of pho, there is the more reasonable $33 beef short rib (“big gao”) pho with giant bone sticking out of it if you want the drama and decadence at a third the price, though, sadly, sans lobster. I was delighted with the pho’s anise-forward, 24-hour steeped marrow broth. Even with my month in Vietnam, I was never a pho-file given the sometimes oily, herb-less renditions I had in remote villages and the more exciting, often less-celebrated, Vietnamese dishes out there I’d rather be eating. But for you pho lovers, this is damn good pho, the marrow and meat imparting fatty unctuousness to the broth.
I want to return for other for-the-table items, much as I hate large dishes limiting my option to try more. I especially want to try whole fish dishes. I’m tempted by fried catfish ($95) with “wrap & roll” rice paper, veggies and herbs, pickled cucumber and nuoc cham pineapple sauce. But at half the price, a whole, fried red snapper marinated in lemongrass sauce, topped with lemongrass chili jalapeños, sounds equally appealing. Dammit, there’s also a third: turmeric dill chả cá, a beloved Hanoi grilled fish dish, loaded with onion and dill.
But without extra-large dishes, we were able to dig into more. Chef Viet’s bò tái chanh (beef carpaccio) is an excellent rendition of an underrated, lighter Vietnamese dish. Paper-thin raw beef in a heaping mound of fennel, onion, mint and fried shallot is meaty and nuanced yet light and cool. Chef Viet cuts the beef thicker than a lot places do but using rare filet mignon, this more meaty version exemplifies the restaurant’s excessive spirit.
While the is my #1 starter recommend initially, four marrow “crackers” (for $17) are one of the more non-traditional options amid rich starters like 5-spice pork belly or fish sauce chicken wings. Lightly fried coconut sticky rice cakes are topped with a layer of pork belly and marrow, garnished with grilled spring onions and drops of au jus. It’s fatty and silky (are you catching a theme here?) with the sticky rice cake and coconut soaking up all that richness.
Bánh cuon, or rice noodle rolls filled with mushrooms, ground pork, pork sausage and pork ham, is not only a pork fest but a Gao bestseller. Unexpectedly, this was my least favorite dish, though lively when dipped in nuoc cham sauce. I found myself longing for the more flavor-packed version at Bodega in the Tenderloin.
A playful Vietnamese dish that’s fun to share is bánh khot, mini-savory “pancakes” packed with shrimp, served with lettuce and herbs to wrap the pancakes in before dipping in sauce. Another good time dish is their bánh xeo Vietnamese crêpe, more like a giant, crispy, almost eggy yellowed rice “pancake” filled with shrimp and 5-spice pork belly, plus mung beans, jicama and beansprouts. It’s, again, one of the better versions in town.
Stir fried bò lúc lac (shaking beef) is a crowd-pleaser, with one of the better upscale versions ever being Charles Phan’s at Slanted Door since the 1990s. Gao Viet’s version is up there with Phan’s, all the more needed as Slanted Door remains closed since pandemic and has yet to reopen in SF’s Ferry Building. Cubes of tender filet mignon center the dish with onions and bell pepper, accompanied by a watercress tomato salad. It’s the add-on of their killer garlic noodles that makes this dish one of the menu’s best. Garlic noodles are staple in Vietnamese food and they are appropriately chewy, flavorful and fabulous here. The crave-worthy noodles were a favorite amongst our whole table.
Garlic noodles also come with a grilled whole lobster in garlic lemongrass chili lemon butter, with five spice chicken or other dishes, so there are multiple reasons not to miss them. In fact, fried crab with garlic noodles is another Vietnamese staple, long beloved at SF classics like Thanh Long and PPQ Dungeness Island. Though you won’t see it listed on the menu online, we saw different fried versions of crab with garlic noodles at the restaurant, with the table next to us ordering one. I might wait until our local Dungeness crab is in season again this winter, but this is yet another dish I want to return for.
With a menu this extensive, there are bound to be disappointing dishes. But other than the solid bánh cuon, we had a slew of hits at our table. I’m already wishing I could return for a feast in the bustling, noisy space. And with the staff’s kind efficiency, the no reservations option no longer scares me off. Gao Viet Kitchen is a broad and welcome newer addition to SF’s wealth of Vietnamese restaurants. And you don’t just have to come for the $95 pho. Turns out, there is a menu full of reasons to come.
// 1900 Irving Street, https://gaokitchen.com
Virginia Miller is a San Francisco-based food & drink writer.
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