Menu Mission: Happy Bakery And Deli
The thing is, Happy Bakery and Deli is neither a bakery nor a deli. In fact, it's not very happy either.
But my, is it addictive.
With Sunday's big-time write-up in the Chronicle, Ocean Avenue's best undiscovered secret is now teeming on the big time, and Happy Bakery and Deli's soy sauce chicken may be the next food du jour in the city. The Chinese dive, complete with Depression-era prices, thrives on off-the-menu items:
The formal menu, such as it is, consists of about a dozen items, most of them variations on the soy sauce roast duck, chicken and pork. The uninitiated will find the duck, with its glistening skin and tantalizing layer of moist fat, darn tempting, but the soy sauce chicken is a must. Made with chickens touted as being high in protein, low in fat and containing 48 percent less cholesterol than most chickens, they are perhaps the plumpest, juiciest white birds I've ever eaten. The crackling skin hovers over the soft meat, oozing a salty-syrupy soy baste that's so finger-lickin' good I wonder briefly (as Mike Myers did of KFC in the movie "So I Married an Axe Murderer") whether "they put an addictive chemical in it that makes you crave it fortnightly."With the garlic-ginger side sauce-thing, the $5 soy sauce chicken seems like a magical culinary adventure. Well, maybe not magical. Or an adventure. But when you're at Happy Bakery and Deli, it's not much a bakery or deli either. So it makes sense.
Anyway, send us a menu or fax one to (415) 358-5770.
Happy Bakery and Deli, 1548 Ocean Ave, (415) 337-8198
Today's Special: Happy Bakery Soy Sauce Chicken [SFGate]
[Photo courtesy: Kurt Rogers/SFGate]
