Welcome to the 2017 edition of Bargain Chronicles, wherein we explore some of San Francisco’s most delicious neighborhoods and choose our favorite meals that can be enjoyed for $20 and under. See also: The Inner Richmond, the Mission's 24th Street, Bernal Heights, the Bayview and the Tenderloin.

Quick lunch at Hon's Wun-Tun House

What: Wonton noodle with brisket ($7.80)

When: 9:30 a.m.-7 p.m. daily.

Customers cycle through Hon's Wun-Tun House almost as fast as they do McDonald's. The time between ordering, receiving your lunch and paying the bill is 30 minutes if you're talking between bites. There's a timeless quality to the lunch counter and canary-yellow Formica tables, and to the small menu, which owner Ng Yuen Wah hasn't changed since she bought the business she had worked at for three decades before. Dried flounder and shrimp shells give depth to the clear pork and chicken broth, and the braised beef spooned over is seasoned lightly enough to not overpower it. The wontons in the restaurant's name are, in fact, good. But most diners are there for the fine-gauge wheat noodles, made in-house, which arrive almost crunchy, calibrated so they grow soft just as you're inhaling the last one.

648 Kearny St. (at Commercial); (415) 433-3966.

Roast meats at Hing Lung

What: Barbecue duck ($11 for half, with rice) and crispy-skin pork ($7.99 a pound)

When: 8 a.m.-5:30 p.m. daily

Like many meat shops on Stockton, Hing Lung has two cases: one for raw meat, another for cooked. The Cheung family loads up the steam table with braised meats, chicken wings and fried fish, but their Cantonese roast meats are currently the best in the neighborhood, perhaps the city. (Side note: Hing Lung disconnected from the jook restaurant of the same name long ago.) Head roaster Eric Cheung says he skips shortcuts other butchers take to keep their prices down. Under his aegis, the fat underneath the crackling, sweet skin of the roast duck has been reduced to a phantom gloss, having accomplished its task of keeping the meat tender, and the skin on the siu yok (roast pork) has bubbled and unfurled into a toasty sheet. A scoop of rice makes either meat a meal. Grab an apple from a corner market if you need it to be a balanced one.

1261 Stockton St. (at Broadway); (415) 397-5521.

Jook at Happy Chinese Restaurant

What: Pork and preserved egg rice porridge ($6)

When: 7 a.m.-3 p.m. daily.

After health inspectors forced the closure of Hing Lung Restaurant (not the butcher shop above) in 2012, Chinatown lost its best-known destination for jook. Happy Chinese Restaurant, which serves dim sum and other home-style foods at lunch, may be Hing Lung’s quiet successor. Jook dwells in that soothing state between liquid and solid, deliberate in its blandness. Happy’s porridge with pork and preserved egg, however, is more complex than that. Among the chunks of preserved eggs and flecks of braised pork, which varies from tender to a welcome al dente, are strands of ginger, plus enough chopped cilantro and scallions to crunch aromatically in every bite. This is jook that never quite comes at you from the same direction. It may take the entire bowl to sense its depths.

1326 Powell St. (at Broadway); (415) 398-1268.

Spareribs at Dol Ho

What: Black bean spareribs over rice ($3.75)

When: 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Thu.-Tue.

One part cafeteria, one part living room, Dol Ho looks like a portal to the Chinatown of the 1940s. Linoleum reaches up the walls, and the bodies squeezed around its tables offer the only acoustic buffer for the considerable conversation they generate. The average age of the lunch clientele rarely dips below 70, and they are not there to eat and run. Much of the dim sum at Dol Ho is functional, but when a tray emerges from the kitchen covered in conical silvery cups, diners pounce. The best of these mini meals contain white rice topped with chunks of steamed spare ribs and a scattering of black beans. In the steamer, the pork grows smooth and bouncy, without losing that genteel snap where muscle connects to bone. Its juices infuse the rice below. A cup of spare ribs, and a tin pot of watery tea, provides enough sustenance to make it through a morning’s gossip, and half a newspaper to boot.

808 Pacific Ave. (at Stockton); (415) 392-2828.

Noodles at Chong Qing Xiao Mian

What: Guilin rice noodles ($10.95)

When: 11 a.m.- 9 p.m. daily.

Chong Qing Xiao Mian is part of Jenny Wu and Truman Du’s growing chain of Sichuan restaurants (in Chinatown there’s also Spicy King and Pot & Noodle), and perhaps the highest volume. The waiters are barely able to ferry a bowl of noodles to one of the tables before another two appear in the kitchen window. Chong Qing’s Guilin rice noodles, a dish famous in its hometown of the same name, are hardly Sichuan, and not necessarily true to what you’d find in Guilin. But they’re arguably the best noodles on the menu, a collage of overlapping flavors: the chile heat that clings to every noodle as you inhale it, the braised brisket, the crunch of peanuts and tart pickled long beans, the gush of yolk from a tiny quail egg, the steady succulence of the pork broth underneath.

915 Kearny St. (at Jackson); (415) 983-0888.

Vegetarian plate at Lucky Creation

What: Gluten combo ($5.50 for a small), mixed vegetables in golden nest ($9.10)

When: 11 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Thu.-Tue.

For 30 years Sau Ling Lam Kwan and her husband, Lam Kwok Leung, have been serving vegetarian Buddhist food from this narrow storefront with mirrored walls and teal Formica tables. Few meals start without a plate of the couple's wheat gluten puff combination, in which handmade seitan has been fried, pressed and braised into a host of forms, from dense, barbecue pork-like chunks to curry-scented pillows. The combo plate is legendary among San Francisco vegetarians, and justifiably so. Undergoing a similar series of transformations are mashed taro root, soybean curd and mushrooms, savory and filling without trying, and failing, to approximate meat.

854 Washington St. (at Ross); (415) 989-0818.

Takeout tour of Chinatown

What: Whatever strikes your fancy.

When: As soon as possible.

The greatness of Chinatown's takeout bakeries and dim sum shops is, unfortunately, not concentrated in one location. If you start at 11 a.m., you could spend your lunch hour weaving in and out of crowds, assembling a meal from the neighborhood's best takeout food.

At Good Mong Kok (1039 Stockton St.), depart with a container of har gow ($2.10 for 3) and fried sesame balls ($1.80 for 3), then stop in next door at New Golden Daisy (1041 Stockton St.) for a bucket of fried chicken drumettes ($5/pound), marinated with ginger juice and dusted lightly in rice flour. As you're walking toward Broadway, stop by the Taiwanese-inspired Little Swan Bakery (1249 Stockton St.) for a slice of its ethereal mango mille-crepe cake ($5) to save for later.

Loop down the hill to New Hollywood Bakery (652 Pacific Ave.) for arguably the neighborhood's best baked barbecue-pork buns ($1.20), pineapple buns with custard ($1.20), and warm green onion twists (70 cents), which you must not wait even 30 minutes to devour. And then, only then, should you attempt Golden Gate Bakery (1029 Grant Ave.). There, either the "On vacation" sign or the Disneyland-worthy line disappoints seekers of egg tarts ($1.95) time and time again. This is when the crepe cake comes in handy.

Home-style Cantonese at New Woey Loy Goey

What: Two can feast for $36 on spicy salt and pepper capelin ($8.50), pan-fried pork hash with salted fish ($10.50), and snow pea leaf with garlic ($12)

When: 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m. daily.

New Woey Loy Goey, one of the last three below-ground restaurants in Chinatown, simultaneously operates as two restaurants: One caters to the stream of tourists, the other to diners looking for home-style Cantonese food. If you don’t speak Cantonese, it can take a visit or two to convince the servers you don’t have sweet-and-sour tastes, but get beyond that and you’ll find precise, resonant cooking. Take the pan-fried pork hash, a sort of fried meatball that hides the sweet crunch of water chestnuts. Or the capelin, smelt-sized fish coated in a fine layer of flour and fried completely crisp and oil-free, impossible to stop eating. A party of four, ordering well, will have a hard time spending more than $60. A single diner would do well to stop by at lunch, when rice plates (lamb with dried bean cake, rock cod with greens) cost less than $7.

699 Jackson St. (at Clay); (415) 399-0733

Chicken pho at San Sun

What: Pho ga or chicken-leek dumpling noodle ($6.50 for a small)

When: 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Mon.-Sun. daily.

Every corner of San Sun gleams, from the gold columns and mirrored walls to the silvery bowls, cups and chopsticks. Its spiral-bound menu resembles an encyclopedia of Vietnamese noodle soups: beef pho and hu tieu, multiple combinations of meatballs, pork kidney noodles, and noodles with a saday-sauce broth. All are available with your choice of a half-dozen noodle shapes. It seems almost perverse to recommend two of the simpler soups based on chicken stock. Yet the broth is so clear, so present, that the soup doesn’t need much more than a bit of shredded meat, toasted shallots and scallions, in the pho ga, or thin-skinned chicken-leek dumplings whose filling is dominated by aromatics.

848 Washington St. (at Ross Alley); (415) 296-8228.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman