By Aaron Reiss | Originally published by The New York Times Sept. 6, 2019 | Updated Sept. 19, 2019
Two years ago, Paul Eng decided to confront a reality he had been facing most of his life: He was the heir to a tofu tradition who had no idea how to make tofu.
Mr. Eng’s grandfather learned the trade in the 1930s from fellow immigrants shortly after he arrived in Chinatown. He went on to open up a small tofu shop on Mott Street, called Fong Inn Too, and developed recipes that would become well loved in Chinatown for more than eighty years. When Mr. Eng’s parents closed the shop in 2017, the recipes, never written down, disappeared with it.
At one point, while trying to recreate those recipes, Mr. Eng asked one of his parents’ former employees how much baking soda a particular recipe called for. He said, “A cup.”
“A cup, like eight ounces? Like a U.S. standard cup measure?”
“No,” the man said, “a cup.”
“Like a coffee cup?”
“No, this one cup that we had at the shop.”
The cup, naturally, had been thrown out.
Unlike his brothers, who stayed in Chinatown and helped with the shop, Mr. Eng left the neighborhood at a young age to pursue a different path: One that would take him to Moscow and back and through various artistic endeavors, before he unexpectedly landed in the world of artisanal tofu.
Paul Eng at the newly opened Fong On.
Credit: Aaron Reiss for The New York Times