Obama campaigns at restaurant illegally serving shark fin soup

SFGate.com

By Carla Marinucci

President Obama, who signed the Shark Conservation Act into law last month, apparently didn’t check out the menu before he made a surprise visit Thursday to a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown that is among a handful still serving shark fin soup, a delicacy that has been outlawed in California.

The Great Eastern restaurant, a Chinatown landmark on Jackson Street, has a $48 single serving of braised shark fin soup on its menu, and was the site of the president’s drop-in after he landed in San Francisco to attend three fundraising events.

Obama made an unannounced visit to the venue, according to a pool report provided of the event, entering the restaurant wearing no jacket and with his sleeves rolled up. Patrons, “mostly of Chinese origin, shrieked, ‘Obama! Obama!’ … getting up out of their chairs, rushing to the president and leaving plates of low mein behind,” according to the report.

“How are you? Good to see you!” Obama told diners.

The president “spent time working the dining room, posing for pictures and shaking hands,” then picked up an order of two bags of food to take out, paying for his meal at the cashier’s desk, the report said.

His motorcade attracted huge crowds as it wended through the San Francisco streets on the way to his first of two fundraising events on Nob Hill.

The president ordered shrimp dumplings, pork dumplings, steamed pork buns, Shanghai dumplings and stuffed mushrooms – but no soup of any kind, including shark fin soup that the Great Eastern sells in three varieties, a restaurant employee said.

Distribution and sale of shark fin products – which cost hundreds of dollars per pound – were outlawed in California after a roiling debate that accompanied passage of AB-376 by Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-Cupertino, last year. The legislation aimed to ban what supporters said was a legacy of horrific cruelty and deep ecological impacts on the species with the capture of millions of sharks annually for the delicacy.

The soup, for hundreds of years a specialty favorite at Asian celebrations, remains on sale in a few San Francisco venues as a result of a loophole in the law that is also being challenged in the courts.

The ban on shark products, signed into law in October by Gov. Jerry Brown, went into effect on Jan. 1. But it allowed for the sale and use of fins already in California – one of the largest markets in the world for such products – until July 1, 2013.

The Shark Conservation Act, signed by Obama on Jan. 4, aims to protect most shark species from being harvested for their fins and prohibits cutting fins of a shark at sea. Federal law allows shark fin suppliers to sell the product if the fin was obtained legally, which requires keeping the carcass intact.

The Save Our Seas Foundation, an ocean protection group, has estimated that as many as 72 million sharks annually are subjected to “finning,” a process of slicing off their fins and leaving them to die, for culinary purposes.

A San Francisco-based association of shark fin suppliers sued the state recently over the passage of the California ban of shark fin products. It said the new law violates Congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce.

Great Eastern, a local Chinatown favorite, is highly regarded for its menu and was cited in by San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer on Monday as one of the region’s best restaurants.

Only nine restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of the largest Chinese American community outside of mainland China, still serve the soup, according to an Internet search.

Chronicle staff writers Suzanne Herel and Jill Tucker contributed to this report.

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