Inside Queens, San Francisco's Expertly Curated Korean-American Superette
At Queens, fresh kimchi and Chapagetti instant noodles share space with bags of Rancho Gordo beans and bottles of natural wine.
Clara Lee and Eddo Kim, who are married and opened the hybrid market-deli in the Inner Sunset neighborhood last summer, intentionally straddle the line between nostalgic and contemporary. The superette’s shelves, full of direct-from-Korea essentials and local products they love, represent their Korean-American identities.
Both their parents immigrated from Korea to the United States in the 1980s; Lee’s from Seoul and Kim’s from Busan and Yeongju. Lee was raised in New York and Kim in Los Angeles. They left careers in the education world to launch Queens—to the initial chagrin of their parents, who worked long hours in small businesses so their children wouldn’t have to. They started by delivering home-cooked Korean meals to homes throughout San Francisco and hosting pop-ups before opening the market. As an essential business Queens has remained open throughout the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, with all prepared food available for takeout only. All of Queens’ goods are now also available for local and national delivery.
They named the superette after the queens of Lee’s lineage, the women through whom generations of recipes and flavors have been passed down.
“We shoulder that responsibility of preserving culture,” said Kim, who can often be found working the floor, pointing customers to a new aged soy sauce or sharing the best uses for their house-made chili oil. “For us, it's being able to have a space where we can connect past, present and think about what the future looks like.”
Photo by Alanna Hale1/5Lee and Kim designed the space to feel like a home. Pre-pandemic, they hosted after-hours dinners at a midcentury-modern table set with Breuer cane chairs, fresh flowers, and long wooden spoons in a dining room at the back of the market. The table looks into the open kitchen, where diners could watch Lee prepare bowls of goguma bap, velvety rice and barley cooked with hunks of soft sweet potato, and warming dwenjang jjigae, a fermented soybean stew. “We connect with food because it connects us with people and with stories,” Lee said. “A superette really made sense to us (as) the perfect opportunity to continue those discussions and those connections.”
Photo by Alanna Hale2/5When Lee sees peak-season tomatoes or Fuyu persimmons at the farmers market, her mind is already in the Queens kitchen, reinterpreting family recipes with Bay Area bounty. Cheong, a classic fruit marmalade, made from local tangelos and Meyer lemons. Fennel and pear kimchi. Turmeric rice with yu choy from Shao Shan Farm in Bolinas, grown by Scott Chang-Fleeman, a young Chinese-American farmer with a similar “passion for thinking about the farm as a way of connecting to his heritage and identity,” Kim said. Many products they source from Korea—deeply flavored perilla oil, chive noodles, artisan honey—are made by young, second-generation producers they find on Instagram and strike deals with on KakaoTalk, Korea’s popular messaging app.
Photo by Alanna Hale3/5Queens is the couple’s ode to the delis their relatives opened when they immigrated to America, called banchan jip, or a place that specializes in banchan. “Those were really needed in terms of preservation and survival for people of our parents’ generation because they were always working and needed places like that to grab staples,” Kim said. At Queens, a grab-and-go case is stocked with marinated meats, D.I.Y meal kits, and ever-changing banchan, like myulchi bokkeum (stir-fried baby anchovies) flown in from a sought-after Korean fisherman, Hong Myung Wan (better known as Captain Hong), who supplies Michelin-star restaurants there. Queens is the only U.S. store that sells his exceptional anchovies.
Photo by Alanna Hale4/5One of Queens’ early pop-ups was at Birba, a San Francisco natural wine bar. “We always felt like natural wine, the wines that are replicating those types of flavor and intervention processes, go really well with Korean food because they’re really refreshing and have good juice,” Lee said. The wine selection is their best kept secret, from an El Dorado County vermentino from Dewey’s, a small local producer whose wine the couple gave as wedding favors, to zippy pet nats that remind Kim of makgeolli, the milky, slightly sparkling Korean rice liquor.
Photo by Alanna Hale5/5The commanding clay fermentation vessels, or onggi, that stand guard throughout the superette have a surprising origin. Adam Field, an American artist who studied traditional Korean pottery-making under an onggi master in South Korea, crafts them by hand in Helena, Montana. (You can also find his onggi in David Chang’s restaurants.) Smaller onggi available for purchase share shelf space with wooden vases from Jeju Island in South Korea and pastel ceramics made by Raina J. Lee, a Korean-American artist in Los Angeles. “For us, all the tensions and conflicts, all the stories, all the layers is really what Clara and I want to have here,” Kim said.
