Korean rolled omelet offers a lesson in cooking intuition

From an early age, Monica Lee writes in her new cookbook, it was clear she possessed sohn mat, thekoreanterm for a natural instinct for cooking that...

From an early age, Monica Lee writes in her new cookbook, it was clear she possessed "sohn-mat,” the korean term for a natural instinct for cooking that translates to "flavor in the fingertips.”

It’s such an important part of her story - she never saw (never mind used) a measuring cup or spoon even as she ran a Koreatown restaurant in Los Angeles for decades - that it became the title of the book.

"Sohn-mat” is the story of Lee’s groundbreaking restaurant, Beverly Soon Tofu, which closed during the pandemic, and a guide to her intuitive style of korean cooking (with measurements added).

The restaurant was pioneering in that it specialized in soon tofu chigae, a bubbling hot bowl of soft tofu stew, which Lee made to order. And over its decades of operation, Beverly Soon Tofu (named, like Monica herself, after an iconic L.A. place) introduced legions of diners to the dish and made them fans in the process.

"If I close my eyes,” chef Roy Choi writes, "I can taste the thick spicy stew and see Monica cooking 12 of them at the same time over viciously bursting open flames with only a pair of pliers in her hand to grab the pot.”