The interior is worn - endearingly so, but still, worn. I click around on her Yelp listing and realize that, for 20 months over the past five years, she’s had a 4.5-star or better rating. She smiles as I notice the tropical flower in her hair matches the ones on her dress. I flip to the Yelp app and sure enough, 4 stars. I start cracking open a handful of pistachios as Mama tells me to pull out my phone. “I get this one, only Mama get, it’s not cheap, honey.” She motions to the bin of peanuts at the end of the bar, and then - with a huge smile - to her small-ish bag of pistachios in hand. Mama tells me today is the two-year anniversary of her husband’s death, and before we can let the conversation pause linger, she offers me pistachios, which are a pretty huge deal inside these walls. It’s a different Friday night in Chinatown at Bow Bow Cocktails, ahead of the 9 p.m. “He was so happy.”Īnd while she credits her husband with most of the bar’s innovations (from the peanuts to the karaoke), it’s Mama who is responsible for the bar’s soul.
“People leave their bags, their phones - one time, a guy left a bag with a computer in it, calls me, ‘Do you have it?’ ‘Yeah, honey,’” she says.
She doesn't have any children, and yet she’s a central mother figure in San Francisco’s nightlife scene, with free peanuts to soak up Tiger beers and Chinese whiskey, and the most mom way to ask you what you'd like to drink: “How you doing, honey?” “Thirty years ago, I was just Candy,” she says.
The 69-year-old proprietor of the longtime Chinatown watering hole immigrated to San Francisco from Taiwan in 1971, bought Bow Bow in 1986 with her husband, and soon thereafter her "Candy" alter ego was born. A candy bar for appetizer and dessert!? Sign me up.Except you don’t know her as Hsiu-Mei Wong. Most of the current panforte connoisseurs laud the flexibility they have to be eaten as appetizers or desserts or even with a cheese platter. Recent versions are reportedly softer and not as rock hard as their ancestor versions. From dates to dried papaya, the ingredients vary slightly depending on the batch. Several companies in California have begun making this medieval treat again and say that using local ingredients have made panforte more palatable to the modern candy lover. Now they’re coming back as a high-end dessert item. And it’s made in a really similar fashion to many other candies we know and love, by heating sugar and honey to a high enough temperature to change their consistency to a hardened state. But all the key ingredients are there: sugar, nuts, cinnamon, honey and more.
In fact the word, panforte, literally means “strong bread”. It’s not a candy bar like you’d find today, it’s more of a very dense fruit and honey cake. It’s called panforte and it originated in Italy during the time of the Crusades as early as the 11th Century. In San Francisco recently, the 37th annual Fancy Food Show featured three modern versions of what could be called the first candy bars ever. Yes, there is that story about Joseph Fry in the 1800s, but there could a candy bar that arrived much much earlier than that. What was your first candy bar? Butterfinger or Snickers maybe? Did you ever wonder where the first candy bar came from.