Spicy Beef Tendon Challenge – A Food Tournament with Friends

Spicy beef tendon (麻辣牛筋) is a cold dish easily found in restaurants specializing in Sichuan and Sichuan-adjacent cuisines. Hong is obsessed with it, and the rest of us are not far behind. It’s such a crowd-pleaser that the kids would happily eat it despite the spicy seasoning. With such premise, it was a matter of time before someone asked the question – which restaurant made it best?

After my months-long sampling of beef noodle soups and the family’s heated debate on sparking water, we had a clear vision on how to objectively answer that question. In fact, spicy beef tendon was among the best food to compare side by side. Because it was a cold dish, we could buy it from many restaurants without worrying about anything losing heat or getting soggy. It also came in bite-size slices and was possible to compare a variety without overly stuffing ourselves (in contrast to dishes like scallion pancake). The primary logistic hurdle was the overall volume of food, e.g. our ability to consume the leftovers. Allowing half cans of bubbly water go flat was sad already, but there’s no way we could waste beef tendon like that.

Then we met Marion’s parents, a couple that shared our love for food and geeky “scientific” stuff. With zero hesitation, they agreed to join us on this quest. The game was set for the Labor Day weekend.

The Setup

Via Google Maps, I browsed the menu of all nearby restaurants suspected of serving spicy beef tendon. From there, we bought a takeout serving from each of the 10 closest to Millbrae. The map below heavily overlapped my beef noodle soup list from before, which makes sense. In fact, I was surprised by the few restaurants with good noodle soup but not beef tendon.

Once we laid out all the food on our friends’ kitchen counter, the two families took turns serving it to each other for the blind taste test. Geoffrey and Nisana were both fun to work with, and may have taken the flavor analysis more seriously than we did. Xuan and Ting both eagerly joined the quest, but Ting dropped out half way after hitting her spicy limit. For setting up the tournament, we chose our 4 most familiar restaurants (A, B, C, and D in black) as seeds, and arranged a slightly different bracket for each family.

Crunching the Numbers

After picking up the first 3 or 4 orders, it struck me just how differently this same dish cost at different restaurants. At the same time, they also came in containers with a substantial variation in weight. I put food on the table with a job that obsesses over cost and value of stuff all day long, so there is a natural urge for me to quantify this observation.

I weighed the takeout orders immediately after bringing them home. Then, with Geoffrey’s help, we measured the empty containers after finishing the food. Beyond that, it also came to our attention that while some beef tendons were dry, others were soaked deep in hot oil. Since the oil wasn’t edible, we subtracted it too when calculating net weight.

For the most part, the most expensive dishes came with a lot of food. The poorest value came from moderate price tags and tiny quantities.

Key Observations

Although all 10 restaurants called their dish 麻辣牛筋 in Chinese and Spicy Beef Tendon in English, an uninitiated person may not be able to identify them all as the same kind of food. Style varied quite a bit and, hilariously, half of them were not even spicy. If I were to solely develop a scoring system, the spicy, chewy thick cuts would get the most points. However, our group of five had a range of preferences and it was cool to compare and contrast opinions.

A. Tasty Place 品味嘉

Mixed in with sesame and shreds of potato, carrot, and red onion, this was an addictingly fragrant dish in the hardly-spicy category. Geoffrey and Nisana both picked it as their favorite.

B. Yummy Sichuan 印象四川

Smoky, spicy, and numbing, this dish had some of the strongest and most distinct flavors, and lived up most closely to the Spicy (and Numbing) Beef Tendon name. The thick tendon slices sat on a bed of bean sprouts, and bathed in a pool of peanut-infused hot oil with a generous sprinkle of sesame and scallion. It was Xuan’s favorite.

C. Little Chengdu 福恩園

This was a huge letdown. Little Chengdu is one of our favorite restaurants, and we’ve loved their beef tendon for some time. However, whatever came in this takeout container was clearly an under-cooked and under-seasoned mess. Although I like my tendons firm, I didn’t love chewing on an eraser. This dish also included shards of bone with the tendon slices. Thus while Little Chengdu would have ranked well on a typical day, their poor showing this time around put them solidly at the bottom.

D. Dumpling Empire 水餃帝國

This awesome cold dish needs a name that’s not Spicy Beef Tendon. The paper-thin slices cooked perfectly to retain a chewy texture was mixed into a salad with cilantro, sesame, and sesame oil. It was a refreshing dish that hardly anyone could resist.

E. Dumpling Era 思鄉水餃

We thought that Dumpling Era was an inferior copycat of Dumpling Empire in many ways, and this beef tendon added to the list of examples. It was basically the same dish with less fragrance and less texture. At least it was cheap, though.

F. Spicy Empire 麻辣帝國

This was a dark horse coming from a restaurant that we knew little about. While heavily spicy, numbing, oily, and topped with extra chili pepper, this dish had an incredibly refreshing taste with pickled carrot, onion, cilantro, and sesame. It stood out in the crowd as resembling a fragrant salad where beef tendon was just one of the ingredients. The chewy thick cut was merely icing on the cake at this point, and I considered it my favorite.

G. Earl Spicy 絕味川湘

It certainly would have been fine on its own, but this dish was below average in every way among strong contenders. Came with scallion, onion, and a tiny bit of sesame.

H. Boiling Beijing 京都食府

The visual and mouth feel first impression of this dish was its excessive oiliness. As if 83 grams of leftover oil wasn’t scary enough, the tendon slices came with quite a bit of fatty edges, too. However, just as I thought it’d be a major turn off, the sour vinegar, fresh bean sprouts, and crisp red onion cut through all that oil and delivered a sophisticated flavor combination that danced with joy on my tongue. Whatever they put in that oil was darn delicious, too. Verdict on this dish was split, with some eliminating it off the bat while Xuan and I brought it all the way to the finalist round.

I. Chef Sha 火焱閣

This was a surprising dish from a hot pot restaurant’s side business. It was spicy, numbing, and smoky, and had a decent amount of scallion and cilantro. A unique aspect here was that many tendon slices came with significant beef meat, which was marinated to perfection. I thought it’d be cheating to consider the beef in the scoring but it was undoubtedly flavorful. Hong ranked Chef Sha at the top of her list.

J. The Noodle Shop 毛家菜

Some people in our group found this dish to be a pleasant surprise. I considered it alongside Dumpling Era as affordable but relatively flavorless. I simply wasn’t that into a Spicy Beef Tendon that wasn’t spicy.

The Outcome

It’s hard to say how much taste is subjective vs. objective. Everyone has different preferences, but most people also tend to agree when something is totally awesome or definitively disastrous. With our tournament brackets seeded two different ways to start, the five of us arrived at 5 separate rankings and 4 ultimate winners. Then we took the average across our results for a final ranking of the taste test.

Plotting the taste scores against value scores, here are some observations:

• Tasty Place (A), Yummy Sichuan (B), Boiling Beijing (H), and Spicy Empire (F) were the group’s favorite. You can’t go wrong with them
• The Noodle Shop (J) finished surprisingly strong, though some of it had to do with Little Chengdu (C) having a terrible day and letting it advance past the first round
• Dumpling Era (E), Boiling Beijing (H), and The Noodle Shop (J) were the best value at around $3.50 per 100 grams of beef tendon

When I give tasting score 75% of the weight (25% for value score), the weighted ranking goes as follows:

Final Thoughts

Over-thinking about food is fun. But it can be way more fun with friends.

Now we’ve got a solid guide to eating spicy beef tendon on the San Francisco Peninsula.

But having just eaten 7.5 pounds of this stuff between us, we probably need to stay away from it for a while…