"Dou Fu Fa "It's got a sort of sweet ginger syrup on top of it. And I love it. Fong On is one of those venerable Chinatown institutions. They make their own tofu. The difference between really good tofu that's homemade and the stuff that you buy in the supermarket is enormous. I used to go down to Chinatown and there was a guy who sold the dou fu fa out of a stairway on Elizabeth Street and it was 50 cents. I was sent to China in 1980 by At Home to do an article about a hotel, which when we got there hadn't been built yet. At the time, Taishan was just really very small, and the center of life in Taishan was the tofu skin factory. They had a conveyor belt—they painted soy milk onto the tofu, and then it went through and came out as wrinkled sheets of tofu skin. Next door was the tea shop, where people gathered next to the conveyor belts where they were making the tofu skin. So I have a really soft spot in my heart for tofu." - brennan carley
