How a low-key neighborhood deli became the Bay Area's rising star restaurant
Steve Joo (center right) chats with customers at Joodooboo in Oakland during dinner service in 2024. (Adahlia Cole/Special to the Chronicle)
It's a statement that might surprise some, considering the measures of success: In 2025, Joo was part of Food & Wine Magazine's annual class of best new chefs, the first in the Bay Area to make the list in four years. Earlier this year, the James Beard Foundation named him as a 2026 semifinalist for its emerging chef award. And the other week, Joodooboo landed at No. 14 on this year's Chronicle Top 100, shooting up 27 places from No. 41 last year.
But the Bay Area continues to be a difficult environment for restaurants, and Oakland, where Joodooboo is based, appears to be particularly challenging, with a string of high-profile closures in recent years, even in the wake of being positioned by multiple national publications as the most exciting food city in America.
What allows Joodooboo, which opened in 2022 as a humble Korean deli offering banchan made with seasonal, local produce and homemade dooboo, or tofu, to persevere is an ongoing commitment to its craft; a community-oriented, diversified revenue stream; and the sense of care shared between its staff. It's a model for how scrappy restaurants can stay ambitious and survive challenging times.
Diners outside at Joodooboo as bicyclists pass by on Market street in Oakland in 2024. (Adahlia Cole/Special to the Chronicle)
For those reasons, Joodooboo is the San Francisco Chronicle's first-ever Rising Star Restaurant, awarded to an establishment that has operated for fewer than five years but is poised to have a lasting influence on the way the Bay Area dines. We previously anointed classes of Rising Star Chefs, but beginning this year, the Food + Wine team will recognize restaurants in their entirety to better reflect that it's an entire staff that makes a restaurant great, from the front-of-house to the prep cooks to the dishwashers, to, yes, the chef.
Joodooboo describes itself as "a California banchan shop for freshly made dooboo and hyper-seasonal vegetable preparations that are inspired by Korean flavors and local ingredients." It has evolved into something more over the years, with increasingly elaborate dishes, such as the acorn noodles with kimchi, nori vinaigrette, and choice of jammy egg or dooboo, or the "melt-in-your-mouth albacore ssam" at dinner that led Chronicle critic Cesar Hernandez to declare Joodooboo one of the Bay Area's most exciting Korean restaurants, notable given a veritable boom in the genre. Now, a full dining room is a common sight. "We started making the joke that ‘oh, we're a restaurant now,'" Joo said.
Acorn noodles at Joodooboo, photographed in 2024. (Adahlia Cole/Special to the Chronicle)
Dooboo and banchan remain the soul of the operation, with Joo and three apprentices painstakingl y making fresh dooboo every day. The process begins by soaking organic soybeans overnight, then grinding and mixing them with water to produce soy milk. After the soy milk is filtered, it's boiled in a specialized machine imported from South Korea. As the soy milk boils, the team skims foam from the surface by hand while waiting for it to thicken. The vat is placed in ice water, a step which helps create softer curds by speeding up the cooling process. A coagulant and sea salt are slowly mixed in, then the solution rests before the curds are placed into molds and the whey naturally separates. The process yields a dooboo that is delicate and jiggles as it makes its way to a table.
Joo, who is always looking to improve on his methods, said that after years of making dooboo daily, he's noticed lots of small details, such as the way curds form and how temperature changes affect the process. "It's been a really fun evolution and study of the process to make it better," he said. "That philosophy permeates into everything that we make, where there's a lot of simplicity on the face of things, but then there's a lot of intention given to preparations."
Blocks of freshly made Korean tofu, also known as dooboo, at Joodooboo. (Stephen Lam/The Chronicle)
Joo and manager Sarah Kasai regularly hit the farmers market to pick through seasonal vegetables that will be fermented into kimchi or prepared alongside the dooboo, tapping into his experience at Chez Panisse and St. Helena's now-closed Terra, which guides how he works with seasonal produce. "We're all paying attention to what's coming in and then thinking about ways to be playful," Joo said.
As spring settles in, diners may find snap peas with artichoke. Once summer arrives, banchan may include squash in a Korean-style garlic marinade or a jangajji - typically pickled vegetables - made with apricot. The team made its first batch of persimmon kimchi last fall, and it became an instant hit. Kasai is personally waiting for it to return. "It's the best," she said.
The restaurant is only part of the Joodooboo story. "One thing that's particularly challenging about our operation is that we kind of have a lot of different moving parts even though outwardly it seems pretty simple," Joo said. "It's just a lot to keep track of and manage, organize and execute from a very limited amount of space.
"But you know we do all that because it's kind of necessary to stay afloat."
Roughly 70% of Joodooboo's revenue comes from the restaurant. The remaining 30% comes from retail, including weekly appearances at three Bay Area farmers markets, and subscriptions to its weekly dooboo and banchan sets. Managing those subscriptions and ensuring that customers can receive or pick up their weekly orders is one of Kasai's most important roles, since they bring in a steady cash flow that has helped the restaurant through slow periods. Customers "just keep showing up for us and it's awesome to know people want us to be a regular presence in their lives and diet," Kasai said.
Customers outside at Joodooboo on Aug. 15, 2024. (Adahlia Cole/Special to the Chronicle)
Despite ever-increasing operating costs and other headwinds, Joo prioritizes taking care of his employees. He said that he is often researching ways of providing a better health insurance plan at a lower cost. He also tries to pay his crew as fairly as possible, especially given the Bay Area's high cost of living. "It's a real priority to not screw my crew out of being paid fairly for their labor," Joo said, adding that he didn't pay himself during Joodooboo's first two years in business.
With four years at Joodooboo, Carlos Santiago is the restaurant's longest tenured employee. He arrived in Oakland from his native Guatemala seven years ago and was once a cook at Nuym Bai, the acclaimed Cambodian restaurant from chef Nite Yun of fellow Top 100 restaurant Lunette in Oakland. Santiago started out as a dishwasher, but as Joodooboo has grown, so have his opportunities, and he now is a line cook, where he works on refining his banchan techniques with the rest of the team. "That's one thing that I like about Steve, he will personally show you what you need to know," he said in Spanish. "I make the food with all my heart and am very thankful for everyone who visits us."
Joodooboo has been through "many tough phases" but thanks in part to its staff's sense of camaraderie, they've managed to endure, Kasai said. "It's really cool having a team where genuinely everybody cares about each other."
Steve Joo and staff from Joodooboo accept the award for Rising Star Restaurant during the San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 event at the San Francisco Design Center on April 6. (Adam Pardee/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Accepting the award for Rising Star restaurant at the Chronicle's Top 100 event last week, Joo called out his staff, who stood behind him on stage. "This is your guys' hard work, this is your guys' dedication, this is your guys' heart," he said. "Thank you all."
