Rec for stinky tofu b/t SFO and San Mateo?

[mzhu (Minhua)]

Anyone have a rec for stinky tofu b/t SFO and San Mateo? Either fried or stewed. Friend is visiting, normally drags us to go to Spices III, but Oakland will not be along the route this time around.

Looking at Joy Restaurant in Foster City currently. Had hoped to go to Chef Cho in Fremont originally but time constraints means needing to stay b/t SFO and San Mateo. TIA!

[hyperbowler]

I haven’t eaten it, but Boiling Point and China Bee both in San Mateo have stinky tofu.

[sck]

See this post from Luke Tsai. He said stinky tofu from Joy is excellent. And he is Taiwanese American.

Hungry Onion Drooling Q&A with Luke Tsai (Dec 8, 2016 8-9pm PT)

I explored several Taiwanese restaurants for an article I wrote for the now-defunct web publication “Real Eats” about stinky tofu — a real passion of mine. Anyway, I think the article is lost in cyberspace now. If I ever get my act together enough to set up a personal website, maybe I’ll republish it. But in the course of researching that piece, by far my favorite place was Joy Restaurant (5 Joy) in Foster City, which doesn’t label itself as Taiwanese per se, but serves the kind of Taiwanese-i…

[mzhu (Minhua)]

We did end up at Joy and it was solid but not stinky enough. Had both fried and stewed.

Joy’s stewed version (臭臭锅) had large square blocks in a clay pot. The stew was thinner, more of a soup/broth, full of pickled mustard greens, and sparse pieces of blood cake. The tofu was low-medium on the stinky scale, but had a nice metallic tang - perhaps from the picked mustard greens.

This contrasts with Spices III where the stew is thicker (with cornstarch?), lots of pork slivers(loin or thigh), bean thread noodles, and some pickled mustard greens.