From the 1950s to the 1970s, you used to find cart noodles, chējái mihn, on practically every street corner of metropolitan Hong Kong. Mobile vendors, many of them working-class refugees and immigrants from mainland China, survived by selling cart noodles. The dish is named for the wheeled carts they’d push around the city, useful for increasing their reach and avoiding the watchful eyes of authorities tasked with prosecuting unlicensed vendors.

Each cart was outfitted with aluminum basins full of toppings and noodles that customers could choose from to build their own bowls. The carts themselves have all but disappeared since a major crackdown in the 1970s, but the noodles remain, sold at licensed restaurants. Each combination, whether a carnivorous conglomeration of beef tripe, intestine and chicken wings or a lighter mix of bok choy and garlic chives, would be topped with a fortifying ladleful of piping hot broth, which you’d slurp down before hurtling through the rest of your day.

Affordable and filling, the noodles became an integral part of the island’s food culture: In Hong Kong, your personal cart noodle combination can carry the same existential weight as an American’s coffee order. With the introduction of cart noodles to a year-old restaurant in SoMa, San Franciscans can begin to contemplate our ideal topping situations.

Greg Poon, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, has fond memories of Hong Kong’s street food culture, which he tries to replicate at his restaurant, Beyond Cafe. Situated near big-box stores and across from the brutal curve of the I-80 overpass, Beyond is an oasis of sentimentality. Its main wall, painted white, features the lyrics to Cantopop band Beyond’s 海闊天空, a classic power ballad often sung during Hong Kong’s recent pro-democracy protests. (The band is the restaurant’s namesake.) Squeezed among the large-print writing are messages dashed off with colored Sharpies: “A taste of Hong Kong in San Francisco,” “Yeet hay all day,” “Good luck Greg” and other messages in Cantonese.

Greg Poon, owner of Beyond Cafe, prepares wonton noodles in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

Fresh uncooked thin egg noodles are seen in a bowl at Beyond Cafe in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

Greg Poon, owner of Beyond Cafe, loosens a bundle of fresh thin egg noodles for wonton noodles in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

Greg Poon, owner of Beyond Cafe, shocks a bundle thin egg noodles in cold water while preparing an order of wonton noodles in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

The restaurant only started making cart noodles ($15) a few months ago, but Poon says that more and more people have been coming in specifically for that. Despite its popularity in Hong Kong, it’s a dish that’s a struggle to find in this city, though some places, like the now-closed T28 Cafe in the Sunset District, have sold it before. In South San Francisco, thematic street food restaurant Night Market serves cart noodles ($14) alongside build-your-own congee and deep-fried squids on a skewer.

“I think people want to do it, but they don’t know if customers accept this kind of concept,” said Poon. But if Americans could embrace pho and ramen, he said, maybe cart noodles have a chance here, too. He might be right, if the success of choose-your-own-adventure-style restaurants like Chipotle are any indicator.

At Beyond, each table gets a laminated menu and a marker, which you use to check off what you’d like. As a baseline, you get to choose four toppings from a list of 27, a number that can vacillate with ingredient availability. (Cue the spiel about supply-chain issues and the reality of pandemic-era life.) There are slippery pieces of pork skin, the texture of Thai lad na noodles; Jell-O-like morsels of duck’s blood pudding; and shiitake mushrooms cooked in oyster sauce. Curried fish balls, a classic ingredient, are tinted orange from a bath of curry sauce and carry a low hum of chile flavor.

Most of the ingredients are cooked from scratch, with Poon presiding in the kitchen. The broth is a long-cooked mixture of pork bones and chicken, without too many aromatics that could clash with the flavors of the toppings. The only exceptions, Poon said, are the beef balls and fish balls, sourced from a vendor that gets the good stuff — the kind you simply can’t get at a market.

If your mom is like mine, she’d probably want to see something green in there. Personally, I love the juicy-crisp bundle of garlic chives, their blanched greens squeaky between my teeth, and, though they’re almost translucent white, the fat door stoppers of peeled daikon radish wedges, which soak up any flavor you throw at them.

Then you let your cravings guide you to choose your noodles from a list of six, which includes slurpy round noodles, the bouncy thin egg noodles you’d find in a typical wonton noodle soup, and pho-adjacent thin rice noodles. Finally, you can home in on the flavor of your broth: Do you want it spiked with a subtly spicy mala seasoning, an extra-savory hit of braising liquid, or plain and clear, to let the toppings’ flavors shine? Even if you go plain, I highly recommend tossing in some of the house chile oil.

Cart noodles with thick egg noodles, mala broth, chicken wings, curry fish balls, beef offals and Chinese broccoli photographed at Beyond Cafe in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

Wonton noodles photographed at Beyond Cafe in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

Vegetarians will have to wait for Poon to come up with a good meat-free broth, unfortunately. Until then, they can try the cart noodles at Night Market, which do have a vegetarian option.

As a composition, cart noodles are hard to evaluate because there’s so much space for user error. It’s up to you to decide if you just want a bowlful of meats, after all. Beyond’s front-of-house staff will tell you what the most popular options are, but it’s up to you to figure out what your personal configuration should be.

The Chronicle’s Data team ran the numbers and figured out that you could try every single combination of cart noodles at Beyond, but it would take more than 1,000 years, even if you ate a bowl every day. (For the purposes of this exercise, we will assume and hope that the restaurant, and humanity, will survive to the year 3030.) I would imagine that it’ll take perhaps four visits to really narrow down what you like, as long as you treat this like an edible game of Wordle. (Noordle?)

I would be remiss to not mention the other noodle dish here that’s been earning all the raves on review sites and even Eater. If the messages from fans are to be believed, Poon’s Hong Kong-style wonton soup ($12.50) is the best in the Bay Area. There’s certainly a lot to love about it.

An exterior view of Beyond Cafe is seen in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

Customers’ writings are seen on the wall at Beyond Cafe in San Francisco, Calif. Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

The straw-color egg noodles are cooked al dente, with a good bite to them, and the wontons exhibit the tell-tale “goldfish” fluttering as they float in the clear broth. The wontons themselves are decent — a bit homemade-feeling and scant on filling. You’ll find better elsewhere. I suggest Ming Tai in the Outer Sunset, if geography isn’t your limiting factor.

The highlight of the dish is the broth itself, which you just want to stick your nose into to absorb all of the rich and roasty scents. Poon uses plenty of dried fish and seafood to build its flavors; it’s that evocative aroma of shrimp shells that gets me in particular.

In our conversation, Poon repeatedly told me that his soups are “nothing special” — that anyone could make cart noodles. But that’s the thing about comfort food: It’s rarely made with the expectation of being something special or especially mind-blowing. It’s faithfulness to memory that Poon is aiming for, and at that, his restaurant excels. Just look at the writing on the wall.

Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic. Email: soleil@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hooleil

1010 Bryant St., San Francisco. 415-565-7395 or www.beyondcafeca.com

Hours: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. and 5-8 p.m. Monday-Saturday.

Accessibility: Level floor. Gender-neutral restroom. Physical menu.

Noise level: Low, but for the slurping of noodles.

Meal for two, without drinks: $30-$40.

What to order: Cart noodles, wonton noodle soup, mango pudding ($5), abalone noodles ($20).

Drinks: Soft drinks, including Hong Kong milk tea.

Transportation: On 19-Polk Muni line and within walking distance of Civic Center Station. Easy street parking. Near several parking lots.

Since 2019, Soleil Ho has been The Chronicle's Restaurant Critic, spearheading Bay Area restaurant recommendations through the flagship Top Restaurants series. In 2022, they won a Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award from the James Beard Foundation.

Ho also writes features and cultural commentary, specializing in the ways that our food reflects the way we live. Their essay on pandemic fine dining domes was featured in the 2021 Best American Food Writing anthology. Ho also hosts The Chronicle's food podcast, Extra Spicy, and has a weekly newsletter called Bite Curious.

Previously, Ho worked as a freelance food and pop culture writer, as a podcast producer on the Racist Sandwich, and as a restaurant chef. Illustration courtesy of Wendy Xu.