Beverly Soon Tofu

When Monica Lee opened Beverly Soon Tofu on Olympic Boulevard in 1986, sundubu-jjigae — the silken, bubbling soft-tofu stew that defines a particular register of Korean home cooking — had no dedicated restaurant home in Los Angeles. That changed with this Koreatown address, which spent more than three decades as the city's reference point for the dish, drawing the kind of sustained critical attention that landed it on the Los Angeles Times 101 Best Restaurants list and earned notice from Anthony Bourdain. The menu was deliberately narrow. Soon tofu arrived in several configurations — seafood, kimchi, and variations in between — each bowl assembled to order and calibrated to the diner's preferred heat level. Galbi appeared alongside the stews, but the kitchen's identity was always the tofu. The room itself made no concessions to atmosphere: modest, small, and often crowded, with the kind of ventilation situation that meant you left smelling of the meal. Parking on that stretch of Olympic required patience. None of it deterred the regulars. Pricing sat in the moderate range for Koreatown, with a full meal for two running around $65 with tax and tip — a figure some diners found steep relative to portion size, though the specificity of the cooking gave it context. Beverly Soon Tofu closed in 2020, ending a run that had shaped how Los Angeles understood Korean tofu cuisine. Its influence on the broader Koreatown dining scene, where soon tofu restaurants now operate at every price point, remains measurable in the sheer number of kitchens that followed its template.

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