SATURDAY MORNING.
FROM THE EDITOR.

THE LAST KOREAN TOFU HOUSE ON GEARY STREET

BY ERIC · PHOTOGRAPHS BY KIWI

For 34 years, Mrs. Kim has been ladling soondubu before sunrise. As her block changes around her, she's not going anywhere, and she has things to say.

It is 5:48 in the morning on a Tuesday in February when Mrs. Kim flips the switch on a tofu press she bought in 1992 and slides the first batch out. The press is heavy. She is 67. She uses both hands.

The shop is on Geary Street, between a vape store that opened last year and a bubble tea chain that opened the year before that. The block has changed around her. The shop has not. The hand-painted sign her husband made in 1989 still says Soon Dubu House in white block letters on a red background. The paint is chipping at the bottom corner where rain reaches.

She arrived in San Francisco in 1986 from a town outside Daegu. Her husband arrived two years later. They opened the shop in 1992 with money borrowed from her sister and a recipe her mother had taught her over the seven summers Mrs. Kim spent in Korea as a teenager. The recipe has not changed. Neither has the press.

“My customers come because they remember their mothers. I am not making tofu. I am making memory.”

— MRS. KIM, OWNER

The math is straightforward. The shop sells thirty-eight portions of soondubu a day, give or take. The lunch rush is fifty minutes long. Mrs. Kim runs the kitchen alone except on Saturday mornings, when her granddaughter, Jiyoung, comes in to take orders so Mrs. Kim can keep ladling. The granddaughter is twenty-three. She works two blocks down at a property management company. She has been arguing with Mrs. Kim for nine months about raising the price.

"My customers come because they remember their mothers," Mrs. Kim said when I asked her about the argument. "I am not making tofu. I am making memory."

The piece runs for 12 minutes when read aloud, which I have started to do every Saturday morning before publish. This Saturday she let me read it back to her in the shop while she ladled the first bowl for me. She corrected three things. The original press was bought in November 1992, not October. The block had bubble tea before it had vape. And she wants me to mention that the granddaughter, despite the argument, is the best register-keeper she has ever had.

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