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San Francisco Chronicle​

This Top 100 restaurant is huge in Japan

Each week, critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan shares some of her favorite recent bites, the dishes and snacks and baked goods that didn't find their way into a full review. Want the list a few days earlier? Sign up for her free newsletter, Bite Curious. I've been hearing from friends and readers alike that they're checking off restaurants on the Top 100, and, girl, same. (Either my colleague Cesar Hernandez or I ate at each of the restaurants on the list, but we both didn't go to all of them.) I recently paid a visit to No. 35 Kajiken, one of Cesar's picks. The San Mateo restaurant is an outpost of a popular Japanese chain that specializes in aburasoba, brothless noodles with mix and match toppings like ground meat, raw egg yolk and veggies. I opted for the nikumori aburasoba ($17.95), which features pork two ways — thinly sliced and finely minced — with scallions and an egg yolk. The noodles are endlessly customizable with a long list of add-ons and included condiments, but I followed our server's guidance and stuck to a side order of yogurt sauce ($1.25), a healthy glug of vinegar (essential) and a few twists of a grinder of dried garlic. Fantastic stuff worth waiting in line for, and I can't wait to return and try other combinations. Burrata is often a phoned-in menu item, an easy-to-love dairy bomb that sounds fancy and doesn't require cooking, save for, potentially, a condiment. Fellow Top 100 restaurant Rich Table 's current burrata dish ($23), a riff on saag paneer, is aggressively not that and was, in fact, the highlight of a memorable recent meal. Dark leafy greens, cooked down with fresh fenugreek and other Indian spices, were a revelatory accompaniment to the creamy cheese and sun-dried tomatoes. The dish was served with warm roti, so satisfying to pull apart and swish through the spread. Words I reach for when describing dips might include 'creamy,' 'silky' or even 'gooey,' but Dolores Deluxe 's Okinawa sweet potato dip ($8.49 for a half-pint container) is the first I've tried that is undeniably bouncy. Boysenberry purple in color and terrifically garlicky, it's still dippable — you'll have no trouble dragging a pita chip through it — but in very un-diplike fashion, it pulls away from the sides of the container. Is it flubber? The texture reminds me a little of that jelly blush that all the makeup influencers are swatching on TikTok. Bring it to your next picnic, the color alone makes it a guaranteed showstopper.