This SoMa cafe serves one of SF’s best sandwiches — from a country almost no one knows

The city is expensive, but your next meal doesn’t have to be. In our weekly column The $25 Diner, we hunt down the best restaurants where you can eat like royalty for a song.

The best thing I ate this year at the Outside Lands festival was a bowl of the mushroom-and-potato Russian dumplings known as pelmeni, served in broth with dill-dusted dabs of sour cream. 

It turns out I don’t have to wait till next August to get my pelmeni fix. AyDea, which sold them at Outside Lands, also ladles out $16 bowls of pelmeni at its cafe on the corner of Sixth and Bryant streets, a five-minute bike ride from The Standard’s office in SoMa. The 7-month-old eatery specializes in the cuisine of the republic of Tatarstan in central Russia, billing itself as “the only Tatar cafe on the American continent.” 

The daytime-only spot is decorated with hanging plants and furnishings that could be secondhand, Second Empire, or both. It is something of a tea room, with half a dozen fortifying options, including a Tatar herbal brew and tart, bright-orange sea buckthorn, which chef-owner Chris Dumesnil calls the “superfood of superfoods.” 

But breakfast and lunch are the staples. In addition to the hearty pelmeni, AyDea’s menu includes uchpuchmak, a savory hand pie filled with meat and potatoes ($11) that’s best enjoyed with a cup of house-made bone broth. There’s also qistibi, a beef flatbread that Dumesnil describes as a cross between a flour tortilla and an Indian paratha ($13). He fries it in neutral camel oil — that’s right, the fat from the hump of a camel.

Other cultural mashups abound. Take the Zang Madame ($13), a hybrid of a croque madame and a croissant with a name that nods to the latter’s inventor, August Zang. Traditionally, a croque madame fuses ham, Gruyère, béchamel sauce, and a fried egg. But Tatarstan is a Muslim region, so ham is replaced with crisped kalbaza, a cold cut made from veal. “All of our proteins are halal,” said Dumesnil, who, although ethnically Tatar, was born in Mexico City. 

Kalbaza — not to be confused with kielbasa, the Polish sausage — becomes crispy when fried, giving the Zang Madame a little bite. To that, Dumesnil piles on a Havarti-like cheese, fresh herbs, Maldon salt, black pepper, a fried egg, and an alternative to béchamel made from chicken broth, milk, and a spice blend he won’t reveal. “Dacha flavors,” he describes it, referring to the country vacation homes of wealthy Russian urbanites. “There’s this very earthy kind of feel. You know you’re eating something from the country.”

It’s a very satisfying breakfast sandwich — gooey but not quite a gut-buster. Pair it with a $6 cup of butter coffee — also known as “bulletproof,” a sugar-free version that incorporates butter or coconut oil.

About 90% of AyDea’s patrons know nothing about Tatarstan, the chef says, which means a bit of explanation may be required when someone new comes in the door. The gregarious Dumesnil doesn’t mind. “I enjoy it. I give them a little rundown of the culture and the food.”

AyDea, which is not a Tatar word but a combination of his daughters’ names, functions as the lonely ambassador for a diffuse ethnic community. It’s so diffuse, in fact, that when the president of the American Turko-Tatar Association dropped in, Dumesnil and his wife, Lili, didn’t know the organization existed. Still, the chef says, the president left impressed with the outpost some 10,000 miles from the motherland. “He said, ‘This is like a high-end version of everything we eat!’”

The Standard suggests:
Zang Madame ($13)
Butter coffee ($6)