culinary tragedy

The news came out today: San Jose Tofu is closing at the end of the month.

This is a culinary tragedy because this tiny shop in San Jose's Japantown makes the best tofu in the Western hemisphere - possibly, these days, in any hemisphere. It's made fresh every day, it doesn't keep more than a couple of days (even refrigerated), and where every packaged tofu I've ever had is gross, slimy and rubbery, this stuff is light, tender, and tasty.

But the third-generation owners are getting old, and tired of hauling buckets of soybeans around, and they can't get replacement parts for their machinery even from Japan any more, and apparently there isn't a fourth generation available to carry on.

Despite its small daily output, San Jose Tofu has distributed to local Asian markets, and that's where I first found it, at a tiny market near where we used to live. When that place closed down, I transferred to an excellent Japanese-Hawaiian produce place near our new home, and when that closed, although there's a Japanese supermarket that also carries it intermittently, I started dropping by the home office whenever I was downtown. I could always park on the street, not bothering to feed the meter, duck into the doorway, ask the lady who was always there - Amy, her name is - for one tofu, please. She'd fish a block out of the vat, put it and some liquid on a small styro square in a plastic bag, I'd give her $2.25 and be out in a jiffy. Then home to the fridge to be stir-fried with veggies and mabo sauce for that evening's dinner.

I'll miss it. I just hope we still have for a while the other server of great things that I go to deepest San Jose for, the equally aging lady who sells the best tamales I've had, from a shop which - unlike San Jose Tofu - has been through 3 locations in the 12 years I've been going there.