Rick,
I have not called any of these places. perhaps the banquet room is a good feature, in my opinion it's the only feature. I'll admit I have no concept of the difficulties related to finding a group friendly venue. On the other hand, perhaps it would be more effective to find a company with a large meeting room to donate a few hours of its' time, and then the meetings could be restaurant neutral.
I have, however, been to the Four Seas outside of balug, and not been impressed. Every few months the same conversation rears it's head on Balug.. Why is it so quiet? The answers are always the same, lack of speakers, the need to avoid drama, and the restaurant. I have no ideas as to how to solve the first two issues, but the restaurant one seems solvable.
There are enough companies in San Francisco who I bet would love the "publicity" of donating a large conference room for a few hours per month to a Linux crowd... Perhaps a change of venue could revive some interest, raise some membership dues, and open up opportunities to hire caterers? I'd personally find a LUG which had a different caterer each month to be something worth attending, and worth paying to attend.
The Four Seas (note name) was and is handy because BALUG founder Art Tyde is friends with the restaurant's owner, which is leverage sufficient to get the upstairs banquet room on a recurring, regular basis (with sufficient advance notice given).
Having the banquet room to itself means that BALUG can have speakers, and acoustic isolation from the rest of the seating so we can have some hope of discussion among BALUG's tables.
And it might not have occurred to you to do so, but you can go downstairs at the Four Seas and order their really _good_ food, i.e., avoid the standard tourist fare you otherwise get in the banquet room.
If it has to be Chinese, how about the Jasmine Teahouse in the Mission?
I assume you've verified that a large banquet room can be regularly reserved just for us there, without extra expense? Ditto for the others?
If you've done none of that but are just throwing out names of good restaurants, the whole lot of the rest of us can do that, too. (I grew up in Hong Kong, Michael; it's basically my native cuisine -- and I lived in S.F. for a long time. I can recommend quite a few good places.) But it would rather miss the point.
And, if you haven't even _tried_ getting the Four Seas Restaurant's non-tourist food by walking downstairs and ordering, kindly do that, then