A Product That Was Too Successful

Fried rice was one of the first recipes I learned after college.

It appealed to my sense of frugality. Rather than throw out leftovers or quantities of raw ingredients too small to make a meal, I could transform them into a tasty dish that could stand on its own.

Here's my recipe from 2009 (pictured).

Wagyu, uni, caviar, black truffle XO sauce and
more are in this crab fried rice, which Lily
has taken off the menu. (Chron photo)

While fried rice still can be a free or inexpensive option to white rice in Chinese take-out, Asian chefs have been experimenting with the dish by adding costly ingredients and spice combinations. "Seafood fried rice", for example, is a $15-$20 offering on menus, right up there with other entrées.

Noting the trend, the owner of a small Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco decided to offer $72 fried rice over the Christmas holidays. It was intended to be a "stunt" similar to the $295 Le Burger Extravagant in New York.

Chef Rob Lam of Lily Restaurant didn't count on the status-seeking foodie culture of San Francisco.[bold added]

Lily started serving the crab fried rice around Christmas of 2020, two months after it opened, and it was supposed to be a two-week item, Lam admitted — a gimmick for the holidays. “The premise was, let’s do something so over-the-top and bougie,” he said. “We called it the #1 douchebag fried rice.” (On the menu, it was the much more politically correct #1 Dac Biet Fried Rice, with “dac biet” meaning “the works” in Vietnamese.) He expected that most people would see it and chuckle at the gall, then order the pho. They’d probably only sell three a night, if that...

To really land a joke, you have to commit to it, so Lam did. He sourced premium red king crab claws from a Japanese supplier; caviar from the California Caviar company and Tsar Nicoulai. His beef was from a high-end ranch that fed its cattle on olives, granting their meat more umami flavor and healthier fatty acids. He studied the art of fried rice with friend and colleague James Yu, who produces ideally fluffy and crisp wok-seared fried rice at his restaurant, Great China, in Berkeley. Lam’s team picked the meat from king crabs, snow crabs and Dungeness crabs and used the shells to make a stock, which they turned into a concentrated, multispecies crab essence that was folded into butter. Taking all of this trouble was one way to keep his cooks interested in the work during a soul-sucking time when all they were doing was takeout. Plus, the bottom line was that Lam didn’t want to put out crappy food, even if it was just for laughs.

The weird thing was, after all that effort, no one was laughing. Not the influencers, who immediately embraced the dish as the next hot thing to eat in San Francisco. Not the wok cook in the kitchen, deep in the weeds with 20 fried rice orders a night. And not Lam and the restaurant owners, Lily and Lucy Lieu, who suddenly found themselves in an existential crisis, trapped in a joke that kept stretching on and on without a punchline.

It didn’t help that they didn’t make any money on the fried rice with all of its premium, market-rate ingredients, or that customers would only order that and nothing else on the menu. The Lily team started sensing that their biggest draw was taking the business somewhere they didn’t want to go. They worried that doing more dishes in that price range would irrevocably change the public’s perception of who was welcome in the restaurant. “This wasn’t us,” Lam said. “It wasn’t who we wanted to be.”

After several reversed-by-customer-demand attempts to kill the dish, it was finally removed from the menu in June. I like Lily's dedication to its quality and mission. When the Delta variant subsides, we'll put the restaurant on the list of places to check out.

Meanwhile, I've got to do something with last night's rice, and the Spam has been sitting in the fridge for a couple of weeks....