Today, I talk to restaurateur Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin, co-owner of Tenko Ramen located in the Pearl food hall, and the new eatery, Best Quality Daughter, which Time Out magazine just named the best restaurant in San Antonio. I had dinner there after we spoke, and it remains one of the best meals I’ve had since emerging from lockdown.
Jen and I talk about throwing grenades at the bygone chapters of our lives, being in the right place for the wrong reasons and vice versa, and the origins of her signature cuisine — a very personal melding of her mom’s Chinese cooking, the summers she spent in Taipei around her extended family’s hawker stall, and her very Texas-American upbringing. Her food challenges the orthodoxy of the “authentic” that everyone seems to be after these days, telling Sam Sifton in a recent writeup in the New York Times Magazine that the menu at Best Quality Daughter is “authentic to me.”
Her restaurant is filled, not only with great food, but also with the original art of friends and collaborators, a lot of which tells the story of the modern Asian-American experience. And if you have any appreciation for the history of San Antonio, the wallpaper in the bar will have you standing staring at the wall, picking out bygone landmarks for longer than might be comfortable for anyone.