Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Chop suey with a cocktail menu. That is the pitch, and honestly it took a 2022 James Beard semifinalist to say it out loud.
Edwin Zoe's new place is called San San, and it sits at 2014 10th St., just off the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. He opened it quietly back in August, a soft launch with 80 seats in the same room that used to be his Dragonfly Noodle before that one closed. So if you walked past it this summer and figured nothing had changed, you missed the whole story.
Here is the thing Zoe keeps saying, and I think he is right. What is glaringly absent from downtown is a Chinese restaurant built for the special occasion. The anniversary dinner. The birthday where you actually make a reservation. We have takeout. We have the paper cartons and the lazy Susan and all of it, and I love all of it. But a date-night Chinese spot with real booths and a beverage director? That did not exist. Now it does.
Zoe is not some out-of-town name parachuting into Boulder. He immigrated from Taiwan to Missouri when he was 9. Moved to Boulder in the early 1980s to go to CU. He has been building this food empire a few blocks at a time ever since. Zoe Ma Ma opened at 919 Pearl St. back in 2013. He runs Pearl Poké over at 2010 10th St., basically next door to San San. The man has been feeding this town for over a decade.
And the name tells you what he is going for. San San translates to "three mountains," and it is a nod to the generations of Chinese immigrants who built the American branch of Chinese cuisine. That is the part people miss about General Tso's and chop suey. Those dishes are not a watered-down version of anything. They are their own thing, invented here, by families who made a living one restaurant at a time. Zoe is treating that food like it deserves the white tablecloth. Because it does.
The classics are the center of the plate. General Tso's chicken. Chop suey, and a seafood chop suey if you want to go bigger. There is a creamy crab and corn soup that sounds like exactly the thing you order when it is 20 degrees out and the wind is coming off the Flatirons. There is a home-style burger, which is a little curveball, and a prime rib they only run on Fridays. So Friday is the move if prime rib is your thing.
If you want the full experience, there is a multi-course tasting menu too. Or you keep it simple. Dinner entrées run
The bar is the other half of this. Full bar, beer, wine, cocktails, overseen by beverage director Matthew Jansen. Booths inside, outdoor seating when the weather cooperates. This is a room designed for you to stay a while, not to grab a bag and go.
San San runs a no-tipping model. They add an 18% service charge to every check instead. So the number at the bottom is the number. No math, no guilt, no staring at the little screen. The idea is to pay the staff consistent wages instead of leaving it up to how generous the table felt that night. Just know it is baked in so you are not surprised.
5280 put San San on its list of the 11 Best New Places to Eat and Drink in Denver for fall, in a story that ran Oct. 8. So the soft launch is over and the word is out. Which means the easy reservation window you had in September is closing fast.
If you ask me, this is the kind of opening that reshapes a block. You already had Zoe Ma Ma and Pearl Poké within a short walk, and now there is a third Zoe concept anchoring the 10th Street side of downtown. That corridor just got a lot more reason to park and spend an evening. And the real estate angle here is simple. When a James Beard name plants a flagship special-occasion restaurant on your street, the foot traffic follows, and the storefronts and the addresses nearby start looking a lot more interesting. Boulder's downtown dining gravity keeps pulling tighter, and this is another weight on the scale.
So here is my honest take. Go on a Friday for the prime rib, or go any night and get the General Tso's and a cocktail and let yourself feel a little fancy about takeout food. Reservations are at (720) 580-1100. Make one before the rest of the state reads that 5280 list.