The popular personal narratives of immigrants and their descendants can get fairly pat at times, especially when it comes to stories about food.

“I have so much angst because my mom packed korma in my lunch box and all of the other kids made fun of me.”

Or: “My old-school immigrant parents could never understand why I loved Raising Cane’s chicken fingers so much.”

(Full disclosure: I have used all of these tricks.)

As someone who reads the genre voraciously, the cadence of these stories has taken on a familiarity, an archetypal feeling that seems on par with Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey: the protagonist grows up eating smelly food, finding escape in burgers and fries. But then she leaves home and her nostalgia for her origins brings her back to those flavors. And then perhaps she writes a cookbook about it.

The romantic notions that we have about the immigrant restaurateur also circle around this tension between authenticity and commercial interests, assimilation and soulfulness. We hold up the chef-artist who crafts tongue-blistering chile fish or aggressively cartiliginous sisig as an exemplar of realness while the restaurateurs who serve up General Tso’s chicken and steam-table curries are met with dismissal, or at least good-humored condescension.

But in California, so many stories go against that grain. Look around the Bay Area, and you’ll see East and Southeast Asian immigrant restaurateurs and their descendants building lives around doughnuts, hash browns and hamburgers, devoting days and nights to food that is far removed from conversations about fusion and authenticity. There can and should be an entire book written about South Asian immigrants and pizza, for instance.

From the creamy grits at Eddie’s Cafe on Divisadero to the thin-patty burgers at Lovely’s in Oakland, it’s clear that Asian Americans have played a big part in the development of American cuisine here in California.

“I think the burger represents for my family a sense of success and a sense of equality,” said Dakota Kim, a writer whose parents also ran such American restaurants. For her parents to perfect this all-American dish in their own way was a kind of victory: proof that they belonged here.

New York chef Angela Dimayuga’s father managed McDonald’s restaurants in the Bay Area when she was growing up, cementing his place in fast food history by inventing the value meal. Ted Ngoy, now known to many as the “doughnut king,” trained fellow Cambodian refugees in the art of doughnut-making to give them a leg up, planting Christy’s Donuts franchises throughout California.

And for some people who grew up within that culinary Americana, that archetypal conflict between third-culture kids and their parents, at least when it comes to food, just isn’t there.

“I grew up eating hash browns, eggs, bacon — it’s comfort food,” Justin Chang said over the phone. His 26-seat Oakland restaurant, Delegates, serves a one-page menu of exactly that, plus burgers.

When he was a child, his parents, immigrants from South Korea, made their living running breakfast and lunch restaurants in the East Bay, serving American diner-style meals with a few outliers like kalbi and teriyaki chicken sprinkled in. Located in downtown Oakland, Delegates is surrounded by construction projects; most of the customers I’ve seen there have been men in orange safety vests and hard hats, gulping down bacon and coffee on their breaks.

Kim, whose parents ran similar establishments in Riverside and Arizona before they recently retired, has a similar story.

“People always assume or ask if it was a Korean restaurant,” she said. But American food was what they were good at, so they stuck with submarine sandwiches, pancakes and Americanized Mexican dishes. “My parents are so American, I can’t even go into how American they are. They can tell you more about hamburger buns than they can tell you about making kimchi at a restaurant.”

Both Kim and Chang grew up in the business, with as much nostalgia for meals at their parents’ restaurants as their home cooking.

In the early mornings before school, Chang recalled, his parents would pile him and his sister into their van and drive them to whichever restaurant they were running at the time. While he and his sister slept, his parents would prep for the day’s breakfast service.

“My dad would wake us up and they’d make us what was easy: eggs and bacon, with hash browns.” As an adult, he keeps circling back to those formative meals, arranging the breakfast plate at Delegates exactly the same way each time. A sandwich board outside of the restaurant says, “‘BEST burgers in town’ — my mom.”

“I do think all of us, people working to understand Asian American culture, we’re figuring it out in the dark,” Kim said, “feeling around to understand where things are.”

One of the most refreshing parts of the recent Netflix film “Always Be My Maybe,” which is set in San Francisco, is one of the leads’ fathers, Harry Kim, an HVAC technician who lives in the Richmond. Played by James Saito, the elder character doesn’t speak with an accent — his family’s clearly been in the U.S. for generations.

That sense of age is present at Marina Submarine in San Francisco, where the decor is worn-in, all red walls and framed beer advertisements. A menu of sandwich varieties looks like it was hand-painted decades ago: roast beef, turkey, hot Italian, an “atomic submarine” loaded with the whole barnyard.

When you go there, you have to order directly with Kyu Cho, the (un-ironic) sandwich artist, and linger next to people in suits and construction workers while he whips up the orders, one sandwich at a time. The shop’s aesthetic and “cash only” rule place it firmly in the old school, catering to the same type of crowd that files into Delegates across the bay.

The same feeling of historicity permeates Bob’s Donuts, Eddie’s Cafe and Beep’s Burgers, the latter which was admitted to San Francisco’s Legacy Business Registry two years ago. These places are neighborhood stalwarts, oases for longtime Bay Area residents, and they all happen to be run by Asian Americans.

While most Asian communities haven’t been so entrenched in the rest of the country, for Californian Asian Americans, people like Cho or Eddie’s Cafe owners Helen and Min Hwang are commonplace. We run the risk of perpetuating the idea of Asians being eternal foreigners by ignoring their stories in favor of rehashing the same immigrant narratives.

For Dakota Kim, putting in time at her parents’ diner gave her a better understanding of what “Asian American cuisine” could entail, making the perceived borders between cuisines feel much more permeable. “I do think that Korean food is American food. And our stories don’t have to be separate. We see burgers and kimchi as so separate, but I don’t think we need to see them that way.”

More Information Beep’s Burgers When the 56-year-old drive-in on Ocean Avenue went up for sale in 2014, Samantha Wong snapped it up. Her sense of nostalgia for the place — a frequent haunt during her San Francisco State days — has kept most of the vibe intact, with respectful tweaks like a restored rocketship sign and a menu revamp. Still, I’m happy to report that the crisp and sweetly pungent garlic fries ($4) deserve a place of honor in the Bay Area’s fry pantheon. The ¼-pound burger ($6.35) is a good-quality specimen that, at its accessible price, still draws students to the place in droves, just like in Wong’s day. 1051 Ocean Ave., San Francisco. 415-584-2650 or www.beepsburgers.com Bob’s Donuts Bob’s rules, hard. The 24-hour doughnut shop on Polk Street has been in the Ahn family since 1977, when Elinor Ahn purchased it from the Bob. “People ask who Bob is, and we tell them we’re all Bob,” Rachel Ahn told The Chronicle back in 2016. Come for the perfect apple fritters; stay to watch the next #donutchallengefail. 1621 Polk St. (at Clay Street), San Francisco. 415-776-3141 or www.bobsdonutssf.com Delegates At Delegates, the menu is one page of sandwiches and all-day breakfast items, though a cooler by the register features grab-and-go salads and fruit bowls as well. The food is utilitarian and straightforward, much like the decor, and served on paper plates. Unsurprisingly, nothing on the menu is over $8, even if you opt to add avocado and meat to the two-egg breakfast sandwich ($5), which I recommend. I’d love more aggressive seasoning on the food overall. 578 14th St., Oakland. www.delegatesoakland.com Eddie’s Cafe Helen and Min Hwang have been holding it down at Eddie’s Cafe for decades, seeing the color and countenance of the folks walking by their corner of Divisadero and Fulton change drastically over time. But Helen will still pick out special mugs to match the people who order coffee, and the Southern-inflected all-day breakfast still draws lines out the door. Like at any typical greasy spoon, the food is exactly what you’d expect; but isn’t that the point here? 800 Divisadero St., San Francisco. 415-563-9780 Marina Submarine Order the avocado when you go to Marina and get a sub sandwich, people told me, and I had no regrets when I saw what happened next. It makes every avocado toast you’ve eaten look like a single nacho chip with a smear of guacamole on it. Kyu Cho’s avocado service (yes, “service”) is a landmark in and of itself; watch him slice fat slabs off of the fruit, always perfectly ripe, and load up your sandwich until it’s almost 15 percent avocado. Pro tip: The medium size of any sub is enough for two lunches. 2299 Union St., San Francisco. (415) 921-3990 Lovely’s in the Lodge The burgers ($6 for a single, $9 for a double) at Lovely’s, a nearly year-old pop-up inside of the Lodge bar in Oakland, are carefully constructed: of hand-ground Angus beef, farmers’ market vegetable toppings and mayonnaise made from scratch. The cheese, however, is proudly American — that is, the uber-melty processed stuff that proprietor Mikey Yoon’s parents served at their American-style deli while he was growing up. I tend to agree with Yoon that American is the way to go with a smashed burger: nothing else seeps into the meat’s fried crevices, like a weighted blanket, better. It’s an outstanding example of the genre, without any outlandish bells and whistles to add any static to the concept. 3758 Piedmont Ave., Oakland.