Best Quality Daughter
Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin runs the kitchen-sink instinct of The Monterey, where she started as a fry cook, through Chinese American cooking. That is how Cajun boudin and queso Oaxaca end up inside an egg roll.
Why go
Dobbertin grew up in San Antonio in a cooking family: her father a chef, her mother a cook, one grandfather a Chinese pastry chef, an uncle running a Taiwanese noodle stand.1 She went a different way first, spending six years in Thailand doing nonprofit work, then came home burned out, moved in next door to The Monterey and took a job making its fries under Quealy Watson.1 The two of them built Hot Joy out of Asian-influenced pop-ups and then Tenko Ramen at the Pearl, and this is their second restaurant together.1 The name came before the food. It is from the line in The Joy Luck Club, You pick worst quality crab because you have best quality heart,
and the magazine calls the restaurant a nod to the complex relationships between Chinese American women and their Chinese-born mothers.
1 She was a James Beard Emerging Chef nominee in 2023.3
Order this / avoid
- Order: the smashed cucumbers. Edmund Tijerina describes
chunks of mashed cucumber on a bed of garlicky, earthy tahini for a Sichuan-meets-Mediterranean feel.
1 - Order: the egg rolls
filled with a mixture of crabmeat, Cajun boudin and gooey queso Oaxaca,
which Tijerina calls a guilty pleasure and a must.1 - Order: the fat noodle short rib, which arrives
with a black bean sauce, roasted tomato, gai lan, five spice and cilantro with crispy shallots.
1 - Order: an ice cream sandwich to finish. One version came on fried mantou with chocolate and salty fried peanuts.1
- Avoid: memorizing any of that. The menu changes regularly and the dishes above are what a critic ate in 2021.1
What locals & experts say
- San Antonio Magazine, Edmund Tijerina, April 2021:
just more than four months in, they have already delivered menus that have a dazzling sense of creativity with control and finesse.
1 - Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin, on the brief:
Imagine the glory dishes of The Monterey, but all the dishes are Asian.
1
Good to know
- Where it is: the Historic Pearl, in the room that was the Granary. It opened in November 2020.21
- The art is part of it. The ceramic artist Jennifer Ling Datchuk shaped the room's art and has pieces of her own in it.1
- The review has a year on it. Tijerina wrote in April 2021 and the dishes above are his from that visit.
Verdict
could-visit — Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin set the brief herself, the glory dishes of The Monterey done Asian, which in practice means crab boudin and queso Oaxaca inside an egg roll and smashed cucumbers on tahini. Edmund Tijerina praised the control behind that creativity for San Antonio Magazine, and she was a James Beard Emerging Chef nominee in 2023. The rung sits mid-ladder because Tijerina wrote in April 2021 and the menu has been changing ever since.