The thread got one substantive reply. The commenter steered toward R&G Lounge on Kearny Street — a 40-year institution in the neighborhood, strong on salt-and-pepper crab and whole-fish preparations — and pivoted to dim sum, recommending Dragon Beaux in the Richmond and Palette Tea House in the Sunset. Both are well-regarded. Neither is in Chinatown, and neither was what the person asked.

The commenter's aside is the actual story: "a lot of the best Chinese food in SF isn't" in Chinatown. The Richmond District, particularly the Inner Richmond along Clement Street, has long carried much of the city's working Cantonese restaurant infrastructure — the Hong Kong-style cafes, the congee shops, the noodle houses that would be the natural home for 鼓油王炒面. Chinatown itself skews toward banquet-style Cantonese and tourist-adjacent operations, with fewer of the everyday cafe formats where this dish lives.

For a visitor optimizing for Chinatown geography, that's a real gap. The dish exists in this city — the operators running Hong Kong-style cafes in the Richmond keep it on their menus — but it's not concentrated in the neighborhood most visitors are pointed toward.

If you're coming in from out of town and this is the dish you want: budget time for the Richmond.