On Sunday mornings, the mid-Sunset’s Irving Street is alive. Asian grandmothers with bulging shopping bags negotiate for the best seafood at Sunset Super; restaurant owners rinse down front sidewalks as they prepare to open for lunch; and neighbors line up out the door for roast duck and pork at Lam Hoa Thuan and bubble tea at T-Pumps. Outside of Uncle Benny’s doughnut shop, home to the ’hood’s finest apple fritter, an elderly man plays familiar tunes on the ehru, a Chinese stringed instrument. Up the street, Pineapple King and Sheng Kee bakeries release bursts of sugared air into the soft ocean breeze.

Conspicuously lacking in this weekend tableau are flocks of bleary-eyed 20somethings, bottomless mimosas, $16 plates of eggs benedict and other hallmarks of a city that has become, to many, an increasingly “unlivable” playground for the young and moneyed. This is the charm of the middle Sunset, a culturally rich neighborhood that’s overlooked by many except those who live here — and that’s just fine with us.

When I moved to the Sunset from Hayes Valley last summer, I found a slice of still-functioning San Francisco, home to families and immigrants and normal people living everyday lives — a corner of life that often gets forgotten in the endless discussions about the battle over the city’s soul.

When outsiders come to the Sunset, they usually head from the Golden Gate Park museums to the bustle of Ninth and Irving, the metropolis of the neighborhood, or out to the surfer-chill of Outerlands and Ocean Beach.

The unlovely stretch of Irving between 19th and 25th, the middle child of the Sunset in so many ways, is for locals. Its stucco buildings, dotted with a few scraggly trees, house a dense mishmash of restaurants, bars and shops that can seem impenetrable to the uninitiated — but are secretly home to some of the best eating in town.

My first act was finding the best dumplings, and I spent a happy Saturday morning going from one takeout dumpling shop to another. Some had too-gummy wrappers or boring fillings, but others made me take notice, like the bamboo- and ginger-studded cilantro dumplings from the tiny, cash-only TC Pastry. I soon got to know the pleasures of its pastry case well: excellent pot stickers, wonton noodle soup and deep-fried items (avoid the sticky rice).

Because food is how I relate to the world, assigning myself these mini-quests became the way I connected to my new neighborhood. Next I tackled the pho situation (Kevin’s Noodle House is a good basic, but Loi’s serves it with barbecued lemongrass beef and blackened shrimp). When I came down with a head cold, I looked into coconut-curry soup (Marnee Thai has the edge over PPQ). I methodically made my way through the neighborhood’s sandwiches — Lucca Deli’s behemoth Italian heroes, Handy Deli’s freshly roasted turkey, Sunrise Deli’s falafel wrap. I spent lunch breaks gorging on weekday specials at Micado Teriyaki and Shangri-La Vegetarian Restaurant.

A few years back, the city decided to undergo a revitalization for these Sunset blocks. It launched a rebranding called “Around the Corner, Around the World,” trying to sell the area as the city’s International District and best-kept secret. That project didn’t quite take, although the city’s efforts to improve the strip continue. But because this may be the most multicultural neighborhood I’ve ever lived in, I started to wonder how all these layers had developed in harmony.

The Sunset began as sand dunes. If you walk in the western parts of Golden Gate Park or the hills of Golden Gate Heights, you’ll notice that the ground is still sand.

“The Sunset was thought to be the great sand waste,” says Woody LaBounty, who runs the Outside Lands project covering the history of the Western neighborhoods of San Francisco. While the Gold Rush city flourished, the foggy dunes housed only a few farms and dairies, dynamite factories and roadhouses on the way to the beach. There were no utilities or transit. “No one was living out there until the 1890s,” he says.

Eventually the growing city migrated west into the “outside lands,” in part because of the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition, a brainchild of San Francisco Chronicle publisher Michael de Young to piggyback on the success of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. That event brought 2 million people to the neighborhood and gave the Sunset its first business, Irish pub the Little Shamrock, which is still open on Ninth and Lincoln.

Back to Gallery The Middle Sunset’s vibrant food scene captures a slice... 13 1 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 2 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 3 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 4 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 5 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 6 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 7 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 8 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 9 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 10 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 11 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 12 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 13 of 13 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle

























Gradually the dynamite factories closed and civilization began to fill in. By the fifties, it was a suburban paradise in the city. Blocks were filled with diners and bakeries, where many Sunset locals created fond memories of childhood haunts and first dates.

“Really, growing up in the Sunset, it felt like the suburbs of San Francisco. It was just so out of that golden age of the ’50s that you see on TV,” says Eric Kauschen, a local history blogger who lives with his family in the house he grew up in — which his Italian American grandparents bought from the builder in 1954.

His childhood Sunset was a place of milk and egg deliveries from the local dairy, Disney movie nights at Shakey’s Pizza, and neighborhood grocers who would call up his mother to say they had a new shipment of basil for her pesto-making needs.

Back then, the dominant population was European immigrants who had moved from apartments in the Mission and North Beach into single-family homes.

Many of those were Irish who were moving out of the Mission. “I think the Sunset kind of reminds us of home,” says Odie McLaughlin, who owns Durty Nelly’s Irish pub on Irving and 24th . The Irish families went to church at St. Anne’s, which still hosts a big St. Patrick’s Day dinner every year, and ate fish from Irving Street’s H. Salt Esquire on Friday nights.

You can still hear the brogue at Durty Nelly’s, which acts as the de facto social scene and networking site for Irish immigrants both new and old. “An Irish bar’s always the pillar of Irish society. It’s the meeting place,” McLaughlin says.

By the late 1980s and early ’90s, the neighborhood’s character was changing again. The former generation of European immigrants was moving to other suburbs, and Asian Americans, predominantly Chinese, started moving into the still-affordable single-family homes. Irish bars became Asian bars, and ’50s-style businesses became pho shops and bubble tea emporiums. Shakey’s Pizza is now a ramen shop; Kieser’s Colonial Ice Cream, a neighborhood hub that sold ice cream, cakes, milk and eggs, is now a pho restaurant.

Perhaps the clearest evolution was seen in the local grocery stores. The hulking Sunset Super was built in the 1950s as a general-service grocer, but transformed into a predominately Asian shop in 1999. Same with the Greek-owned 22nd and Irving Market, which now sells Buddha’s hand citrus, rice noodles and a wall of Asian condiments alongside Mediterranean specialties.

It’s often said that every new San Francisco resident wants the city to stay the same as when they got here, preserved in amber — and it is especially hard for natives to see their neighborhoods changing beyond recognition. But change is coming again for the middle Sunset.

A new city project will bring new sidewalks and colorful crosswalks to Irving between 19th and 27th avenues, and replace the dying trees with dozens of new palms and leafy trees.

There are already a few signs that the demographic is shifting once again, too, this time from a middle-class neighborhood to something that resembles the rest of the city. Swich, a third-wave coffee shop and artisanal ice cream-sandwich purveyor, opened next to the doughnut shop. The Taco Shop at Underdogs is a sports bar that caters to students and a growing community of Millennials priced out of other neighborhoods, such as myself. Shops like Handy Deli, which opened in 1935, have moved from Asian ingredients to microbrews and elaborate breakfast sandwiches. Fancy cocktails can’t be far behind.

It’s easy to bemoan the changes, but it also means more options for neighborhood residents, and more opportunity for small businesses.

Kauschen, the history blogger, remembers his father spending Sundays mowing the family lawn and then sitting around with other dads on the block, drinking beer and shooting the breeze in a perfect suburban tableau.

He occasionally tries to keep that tradition alive on his own block with lawn chairs in his open garage and invites neighbors to stop by and chat.

What do they talk about? The same topic that has captivated San Franciscans since the Sunset was just sand dunes.

“We ask, did you eat at this new place that opened up?” he says. “No? You have to try this new place.”

Anna Roth is a freelance writer in San Francisco. Email: food@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annaroth

Irving Street food

Lam Hoa Thaun: 2337 Irving St.

T-Pumps: 1916 Irving St.

Durty Nelly’s: 2328 Irving St.

Taco Shop at Underdogs: 1824 Irving St.

Swich: 2045 Irving St.

TC Pastry: 2222 Irving St.

Kevin’s Noodle House: 1833 Irving St.

Loi’s: 2228 Irving St.

Marnee Thai 2225 Irving St.

Lucca Deli: 1899 Irving St.

Handy Deli: 1815 Irving St.

Sunrise Deli: 2115 Irving St.

Micado: 2126 Irving St.

Shangri-La: 2026 Irving St.