Last week, I reviewed J & X Bistro, a new restaurant in Chinatown that specializes in the cuisine of Jiangxi Province. To get there from the Chronicle office, you hang a right at R&G Lounge, then a left on Jackson Street, where you’ll pass Z&Y Peking Duck. The original Z&Y is across the street from J & X, and if you continue past it and round the corner onto Stockton, you’ll hit AA Bakery, home to the Chronicle’s favorite char siu bao. Turn towards G&Y Bakery on Clay Street to complete the loop, then end up back at the newsroom, weighed down with leftovers.
The alphabet soup of Chinese restaurants and bakeries is a phenomenon found all over the city: There’s CQ Noodles in the Richmond District, HK Lounge Bistro in SoMa, T C Pastry in the Sunset for to-go dim sum and YH-Beijing Duck House on Haight Street.
While some of these establishments’ names are obviously references to a place and cuisine — J & X for Jiangxi, HK for Hong Kong, CQ for Chongqing — others arrive at them from a different direction. YH-Beijing Duck House’s Chinese name translates to “Yíhé Beijing Duck Restaurant,” for example. G & Y Bakery, a cha chaan teng whose Cantonese name means “darling” or “favorite” and is roughly pronounced “chung yee,” remains opaque.
The lore can be tangled at older establishments. Z & Y cofounder Michelle Zhang has said the restaurant pulls from her Chinese name, Jun Yuan Zhang, but that might be a retcon; prior to the Sichuan restaurant’s opening in 2008, it was a Yunnan spot called Z & Y Garden. The website for 41-year-old R & G Lounge says that “[a]n updated interpretation of what R & G stands for, ‘Roots & Generations,’ reflects its mission to honor the roots of Chinese culinary traditions while passing it on (for) many generations.” As for the original interpretation, Chinatown mythology pegs it to the school colors, red and grey, of Lingnan University in Guangzhou — the Chinese characters on R & G’s logo mean Lingnan Restaurant — though locals joke that it actually stands for “real good.”…