Yuet Lee Seafood Restaurant

Yuet Lee is fluorescent green. Not the soft jade of a feng shui catalog — actually, screamingly, fluorescent green. The walls are the color of a 1970s school cafeteria and the lights are the color of a 1990s corner store and at three in the morning you will find yourself eating the best salt-and-pepper squid in the city and wondering, briefly, if you have died.

You have not died. You have found Yuet Lee, on the corner of Stockton and Broadway, where Chinatown meets North Beach and the late-night crowd that doesn't know where else to go has congregated for forty-plus years. The menu is laminated and faded. The chairs are vinyl. The floor has been mopped exactly the right amount of times for exactly the right number of decades. None of these are flaws. All of them are the point.

Order the squid. Then order the salt-and-pepper shrimp. Then, if you are not yet undone by sodium and grease and the small white bowl of jasmine rice that has appeared at your elbow, order the clams in black bean sauce — a dish that may be the single greatest argument for fermented soy ever assembled on a plate. The squid arrives golden, fried in a batter so light it surrenders the second your tooth hits it; underneath, scallions and chilies and the kind of perfectly applied salt that suggests the cook has not been having a debate about it.

There will be cab drivers here. There will be off-duty waiters from the white-tablecloth places that just closed and a couple celebrating an anniversary they forgot until 11pm. There will, occasionally, be someone weeping quietly into a plate of beef chow fun, and no one — not the staff, not the other diners, not you — will think this is in any way unusual. Yuet Lee is a place. Cash is easier. Don't ask for substitutions. There aren't any.