San Francisco Japantown Task Force

DATA SHEET

Place/Event: May’s Cafe

Address: 1735 Post Street San Francisco

Description:

May’s Café is a small café located inside the Kintetsu Building of Japantown. The café is open seven days a week from 7am to 6pm during the week and from 7am to 7pm on the weekends. The only days it is closed are New Years, Thanksgiving and Christmas. The café’s menu reflects the community it serves. In addition to hamburgers and hotdogs one can also find udon noodles, saimin noodles and spam musubi. Many of their desserts are also unique to the community, sno cones (with syrup from Hawaii), green tea ice cream and tai yaki. Tai yaki is a sweet bean-filled pastry that is cooked on grills in a window for patrons to watch. Recently they added chocolate chips to the filling; this is especially popular with younger children. They make over one hundred fish shaped tai yaki a day, shipping many out to Hawaii and Seattle. Not only does it serve the local people and workers, it also serves as a meeting place for many seniors, who have lunch there everyday and visit with their friends.

History:

In 1973 Kintetsu hired May Murata to run their coffee shop. It was small and had a limited menu of Japanese food and sembe. After a year they saw she was doing well so they let her take it over as her own instead of just running it. The name then changed to May’s Coffee shop. In 1985 it expanded to the café it is today. With the larger space, more food was made available, and a daily special’s menu was formed. Much of the Japanese menu comes from May’s mother and father who ran a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo. Now, May’s daughter, Pearl runs the coffee shop. She has added many new items from Hawaii, including, spam musubi, teri burgers, and saimin. Once a year the café would hold a community mochitsuki, which is a festival for pounding rice into rice cakes for New Years. Every December 29th 100 pounds of mochi were pounded and given away to relatives and customers. This lasted from 1976 until 2001.

Significance:

Cultural, Historical, Social

Sources:

May Murata

Prepared By: Misako Mori Date Prepared: 12/2/04