Mama Ji's
Lily Ji flew to Chengdu and spent a month cooking with her mother before she opened this room. Sarah Fritsche reported in 2017 that the stir-fried pickled long beans with ground pork she brought back had become a staple. She was a Chinese national tennis pro, and she opened the place because she could not find good Chinese food in the Castro.
Why go
Qin Sheng Wang, Ji's mother, pickled summer vegetables so the family had something to eat through a Sichuan winter. The long beans were the constant. Fritsche describes them heavy on the vegetables, with the pork used as a garnish. Fritsche reported in 2017 that Wang, then eighty, still fielded the kitchen's questions from China.1 Neither Ji nor her husband Marv Wolpa had cooked professionally before this.
The dim sum came later. The room started as a pop-up in the back of the Queen Malika cafe. The couple took the space over that May. They hired Li Guozhong out of Koi Palace in Daly City to run the steamers.2 Kate Williams reviewed the result for KQED and split her verdict. The wrappers were thick and the xiao long bao short of soup. The Sichuanese noodles with spicy soybean paste were worth coming back at dinner for. I haven't found anything that critical published since.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the pickled long beans with ground pork. That is the family recipe and the reason the room exists.1
- Order: the pan-fried potstickers. Lani Conway says they belong in every order for the crispy-chewy skins.3
- Avoid: filling the table with steamed dumplings on Williams's account of them.
What locals & experts say
- Kate Williams, KQED, October 2013, on the Sichuanese noodles with spicy soybean paste: they are
as much sauce as noodles—that's a great thing.
2 - Lani Conway, The Infatuation, March 2022:
Mama Ji's is a very solid option if you're craving dumplings and are near the Castro.
3 - Conway's Castro guide keeps the room among the neighborhood's twenty-one and adds the dinner dumplings, pork and cabbage or chive and shrimp.4
Good to know
- Getting in: walk in.
- Where: 4416 18th Street, in the Castro.
- Drinking: Williams found a Belgian beer list Ji's husband had put together, plus Ritual coffee and Red Blossom teas.2
Verdict
should-visit — Go for dinner, not for the steamer baskets. Eat the beans and ask what else the family sends over.