Soleil Ho, San Francisco Chronicle’s Restaurant Critic, on Food, Fusion, and What’s Often Lost in Translation

“Dealing with someone else’s culture, someone else’s media, and trying to Americanize it is something I can’t understand.”

To know Soleil Ho is to know how immediately charming she is; how she can put you at ease with a disarming smile or a hearty laugh. Having shared several meals with her, I can tell you that her palate is one of the sharpest—she notices things that not many others would catch; tiny details that make a huge difference in the overall composition of a dish, a meal, a chef’s ethos and what they are attempting to communicate about time and place.

This is what Ho has brought to her first six months on the job as the restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, a seat previously filled by Michael Bauer, who clung to it with admirable but also disheartening tenacity. Ho’s reviews have exposed readers who were used to Bauer’s love of the fancy and the familiar—at least, familiar to a predominantly white readership—to the macrocosm of Bay Area restaurants. The “classics” can be found in her reviews—Chez Panisse, Swan Oyster Depot—but there’s also a focus on places like Café Ohlone, which examines the Bay’s indigenous culinary roots; or Kyain Kyain, a small Burmese restaurant located in Fremont (a part of the Bay Area I’m not convinced Bauer ever set foot into).

When we meet to chat—over a meal at a restaurant, of course—Ho is four months into her job as a food critic, her tenure at the Chronicle, and her life in San Francisco. These things are new to her when we speak, and I get the sense she is still puzzling them all out. For the first and only time during our dinner together—and in all the time I’ve hung out with her as a friend, outside of the interview—she has to pause when I ask her how she finds the Bay Area so far.

“I think it’s really—hmm, I don’t know.” Her years of podcasting make her a sharp and precise speaker, and she rarely sits in silence, but this time she does. After a few bites of food and a sip of wine, she continues, “It’s a fascinating place, where the threat of precarity is looming over you constantly. Every time you see someone experiencing homelessness on the street, you think, This could be me. The people sleeping on the streets are more diverse than the people in restaurants, companies, newspapers. I think about it a lot.”

When Ho was first hired, it was a major shift for the Chronicle. The New York Times also hired Tejal Rao to be their California Restaurant Critic, and these dual appointments seemed to signal that perhaps women of color would finally gain entrée into the very white, very male world of restaurant criticism. There have been great critics over the years, like Jonathan Gold or Ruth Reichl, that bucked the trend, only to see it resume. That may no longer be the case.

Just as Ho’s sharp taste buds can pick out whether there might be a touch too much cumin in a dish, her reviews have closed in on a new range of venues and accompanying flavors, distinguishing them from the reviews of her predecessor. One thing I love about Ho’s criticism is her insistence that there’s no such thing as a “guilty pleasure,” and that the intricate cuisines of the wider world are no less deserving of a deep dive than a Western restaurant with three Michelin stars.

One thing I love about Ho’s criticism is her insistence that there’s no such thing as a “guilty pleasure.” 

Over our meal, we also talk about video games. You might not associate video games with food, but Soleil Ho and I do. She’s a gamer, close enough in age to me that we share a love of older game systems like the SNES and N64. I ask her what she thinks the connection is between food and video games.

“Games are an exercise in dealing with your limitations,” she says. She begins talking about the Nintendo 64, a gaming console that was a bit underpowered for its day but included some amazing games. “The N64 could only perform to a certain limit, output a certain graphical limit. How do you exist in this fog, and still make something transcendent and meaningful for everyone who’s going to play this game?”

The “fog” is how the N64 used to “cheat” in its graphics renderings—for example, if a game world was too big, it would suddenly become shrouded in fog to hide the fact that the system simply couldn’t render it. “That same exercise in getting through the fog is what happens in restaurants. Take this squid, for instance.” Ho points at our squid dish, in which the squid has been thinly sliced to transform it into noodle-shaped strands. “A squid is only a squid—but how can you mess with it and make it have meaning?”

I tell her this dish reminds me of one I’ve had in Japan, called ika somen. Somen is one word for a type of noodle in Japan, and ika means squid. I have no idea if the restaurant dish is inspired by the Japanese version, but it seems like it might have been.

The things that Ho is most often tagged with on Twitter are bad takes on Asian food. But I don’t think that’s really what interests her anymore. She laments having spoken out about these bad takes for years—most recently about white restaurateur Andrew Zimmern’s ill-conceived Lucky Cricket, a restaurant purporting to serve “authentic” Chinese food.

“It makes me remember all of the pixel-era RPGs,” Ho says, a ruminative smile crossing her face. “Think about Earthbound—so technologically basic, but what really made it sing was the writing.”

Earthbound was a top-down Japanese RPG that looked simple, but had one of the oddest stories ever—made even odder by Nintendo’s bizarre localization, which sucked out much of the original Japanese meaning and a lot of the jokes.

Ho continues, “If you really think about it, my whole theory about assimilation food is just a theory of localization—how do you translate a joke . . . or a dish?”

“If you think about it, my theory about assimilation food is just a theory of localization. How do you translate a joke . . . or a dish?” —Soleil Ho

The more I think about this, the more it makes sense to me. Ho’s point about assimilation food is that immigrants had to translate their food for a local audience, and even when they did it was confusing for Westerners—just as when a Japanese gaming company relied on a white, Western translator and wound up losing the meaning of the original story and dialogue. When Square started bringing their famed Final Fantasy games to the US in the ’80s and ’90s, they too relied on stateside translators to make the games make sense for Western audiences. But depending on who was handling the localization, it could go horrifically awry, such as one game proclaiming, “A Winner is You!” or butchering the names and genders of original characters.

“Dealing with someone else’s culture, someone else’s media, and trying to Americanize it is something that I can’t understand,” Ho says with a sigh. “The impulse to Americanize media from abroad is something I don’t quite understand.”

I ask her to talk more about assimilation food, and how it differs from “fusion” food. Do these terms lose some meaning—much like the word “authentic” has—the more we learn about the foods of other cultures?

“A lot of fusion—we can talk about bad fusion—is using Eurocentric techniques to ‘elevate’ food from outside of Europe and the US. We use that word, and it’s less of a fusion of equals, like in Dragon Ball Z, and more of a blob. The blob doesn’t respect who you are; it just consumes. Maybe you see your face in the blob, but it’s not really you.”

“A lot of [bad] fusion . . . is using Eurocentric techniques to ‘elevate’ food from outside of Europe and the US.” —Soleil Ho

I wonder about the “blob” a lot; about Lucky Cricket, Gordon Ramsay’s Lucky Cat, and that “clean” Chinese restaurant run by white people in New York called Lucky Lee’s (which Ho’s friend texted her about, incredibly, just as the two of us were discussing it). But I can see why Ho is weary of having the same damn conversation over and over again—sometimes it seems like only those of us who know the translation is off truly care, and those consuming the translated products either don’t know or don’t care to.

I ask Ho to think about herself a bit. Given our conversation about how things translate, I’m wondering how she sees her own identity these days. “The basic answer is that I’m the child of Vietnamese refugees,” she says. “Even though I identify as a New Yorker, I’m not. I wasn’t born there. I lived there for ten years as a child, and it was very formative. But, you know, I moved around so much I don’t have a real affinity or sense of home anywhere.”

As she says this, I notice there’s little emotion attached to it; it’s just a fact. For her, to live means to always move: “By the time I went to college, I’d moved with my family twenty-something times. So the lack of an anchor is my identity. The ability to land on my feet and take quick stock of a space and know where the exits are, know where my enemies are—that’s a product of the way I was brought up: an eye to the door, just in case. So much of my life as an adult has been precarious. Moving around so much, you don’t get attached.”

Part of me really wants Soleil Ho to get attached to the Bay Area, to the things she’s found here that she likes: the mom-and-pop places in less-visited cities like San Leandro or Hayward; the robot that makes burgers on Market Street; the maddening pleasures of waiting in line for fresh seafood at Swan’s Oyster Depot.

But I also know the subtler frustrations of San Francisco’s dining scene, and Ho and I share one specific complaint: the lack of really, truly good Korean and Vietnamese food, at least with the depth and breadth we long for. One of the reasons I live in Oakland is that it’s the only place north of Santa Clara that has good Korean food in the Bay Area. San Jose has excellent Vietnamese food, but it’s far away. This is not a knock on the local families that sell their wares here, but the audience for the good stuff maybe isn’t here, the localization too fine-tuned for a Western audience.

Sometimes it seems like only those of us who know the translation is off  truly care.

Just as Ho tells me she hasn’t found good Vietnamese food here yet, our waiter, who looks like a fully white version of John Wick Keanu Reeves, butts into our conversation, regaling us with a tale of what he thinks is the best banh mi in San Francisco. It’s sold, he tells us, at a little mom-and-pop shop in the Richmond District. His go-to is? The falafel and avocado banh mi. Localization.

Ho doesn’t flinch—on the contrary, she is, I think, genuinely interested. She takes down the name of the place. John Wick Keanu Reeves is pleased.

“I’m going to try it,” she says with a smile.