Yellow Flakes, and Not Just the Tuna

(Chron photo)

The Swan Oyster Depot is a San Francisco institution. It's over a hundred years old and has changed ownership once, when it was sold from a Danish family to the Sancimino family in 1946.

SOD is small, hard to get into, and has street parking only. My brother and I had a pleasant dining experience in 2012.

Now it's the center of a social-media contretemps because of allegedly racist remarks. [bold added]

In his posts on Instagram on Friday, Tin Dinh said he and his sister, Tu Dinh, who are Vietnamese, were called “dim sum” several times by a Swan Oyster Depot staffer after placing their order at the popular Polk Street restaurant on Aug. 20. His posts spread across social media over the weekend and into Monday.

Tin Dinh also shared Yelp reviews from several years ago that also called out Swan Oyster employees for reportedly racist behavior. He said he hopes the attention brought by his posts will pressure the restaurant to acknowledge its “racist language” and issue a public apology...

Jimmy Sancimino, whose family has run the Polk Street institution for decades, confirmed that he used the phrase “dim sum” in his interactions with the Dinhs last Friday, but denied that doing so was racist. Swan Oyster uses the term, he told The Chronicle, to refer to customers who order from more than one staff member, as is common at a dim sum restaurant.

Tin Dinh said he started ordering food from Sancimino. He said Sancimino walked away during the process, so his sister finished ordering from another employee. When they told Sancimino that when he returned, he walked away, pointed to them and yelled “dim sum.”

“We have a little saying in here when people want more than one person to wait on them at once. We say it’s like a dim sum restaurant (where) you can have 10 different waitresses come by and drop off food at your table. But that’s not the way it works here,” Sancimino said. “Unfortunately this man (and) young lady took it the wrong way. I’m terribly sorry about it. But they obviously were in more of a rush and they wanted better service than I could provide.”

Comments:

The definition of racist language has expanded far beyond the use of obvious pejoratives. Once-innocuous phrases are taken as racist because the listener assumes what is in the speaker's heart. In this vast gray area listeners should do a little investigation before casting aspersions.

Double ordering costs the restaurant time and possibly money if expensive product has to be thrown out. "Dim sum" was the restaurant's internal alert, a choice of words that everyone would have ignored back in my day but today's Asian snowflakes (yellow flakes?) take umbrage at.

Going further, even if one is called a racial epithet, ignore it. As a boomer Asian-American, I've been called racist names, which indeed were hurtful at first, but after a while I came to realize that the use of such language reflects very poorly on the speaker, and I actually felt sorry for the person.

Our parents and grandparents, who fought in wars and experienced much more physical violence than we ever did, would have laughed at what pains the kids today.