The last good $7 lunch in San Francisco’s Financial District

Yo Yo's offers up extremely affordable and very delicious udon in San Francisco's Financial District. Yo Yo's offers up extremely affordable and very delicious udon in San Francisco's Financial District. Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate Image 1 of / 19 Caption Close The last good $7 lunch in San Francisco’s Financial District 1 / 19 Back to Gallery

Lydia and Joe Lee get recognized everywhere.

In the streets of San Francisco. While hiking in Los Angeles. On flights to Indonesia. At Costco. Especially at Costco.

“Sometimes I don’t know them and they call me out, ‘Lydia!’ One asked to take a picture with us with their whole family,” she says.

And not because they’re famous, but because they make really good (and really cheap) udon.

Lydia Lee has been cooking her deliciously brothed Japanese noodle dish at Yo Yo’s in San Francisco’s Financial District for more than three decades. She was the first employee hired in 1988, and bought the business in 1997 along with her husband Joe when the tiny grab-and-go shop’s Japanese matriarch, Kazuko Yuge, retired.

The shop, which has as many plants as it does stools (two), looks almost identical to how it did in the late ‘80s, save a fridge that now houses the daily-rolled sushi.

The pair have run the business ever since, showing up just around 6 a.m. to spend four hours preparing 20 gallons of broth (plus teriyaki chicken, sushi, and the rest of the menu, which you can see in full in the slideshow above), before happily pouring hundreds of $7 bowls of udon in a section of the city that has seen an upheaval of change since the Lee’s arrived (see: ultra-luxe members-only social club The Battery just around the corner).

“During the dot-com era, the line was all the way until Sansome,” Joe says.

“I couldn’t leave,” Lydia adds. “I had to pick up my son when he finished school at 3 p.m. and I couldn’t even go get him. They just keep coming.”

And even after three decades of every-single-day-lines, they’ve only raised the prices by a few cents, not dollars.

Joe, now 61 years old, points to the price (a half order of udon for $3.50) and the quality (virtually all of their ingredients are imported from Japan, or made by Japanese companies in Los Angeles) as reasons for Yo Yo’s prolonged success. Lydia thinks it’s simpler than that.

“I don’t think that way, I think it’s because we’re friendly with people,” she says.

And they are. Incredibly so. They wear Golden Gate Bridge-sized smiles welcoming new customers through the door. They know who needs extra chili powder and who doesn’t. And they treat the Financial District’s buttoned-up denizens like they were their neighbors out in the Avenues (where they’ve lived since 1995).

Lydia credits working at her family’s grocery store in Lampung, Indonesia for her cheerful disposition.

“After I left, all of the customers told my mom, ‘I miss your daughter, she is very nice,’” she says, her Hello Kitty apron staring back at me. “I went back to Indonesia and all of my friends don’t believe that I have this place.”

Yo Yo’s is much more than just an item for the internet’s regurgitated ‘cheap eats’ listicles, it’s a living example of an American dream Lydia always coveted.

“At the time the boss wanted to sell to somebody else,” Joe recalls of 1997. “And then Lydia went home, talked to her mom, her mom said ‘you know how to do everything, why don’t you buy it?’”

So she did, even though she’d never worked in a kitchen prior to putting on an apron at Yo Yo’s or even received formal training from Yuge.

“This is my teacher,” she says, motioning toward a mirror that reflects back the too-tiny kitchen. Lydia spent her first weeks on the job chopping chicken in the corner, while side-eyeing Yuge’s reflection as she put together a broth recipe passed down from her mother in Japan.

Lydia explains all of this while chopsticking seaweed, tempura balls, pickled radishes and green onions into a plastic tub of udon and broth.

It’s 2:45 p.m. and there’s still a stream of customers trickling in (“The winter months are very busy,” Joe says with a laugh), and they won’t close the doors until around 4 p.m.

Joe and Lydia do this every weekday. When they do take a yearly two-week holiday vacation, Yo Yo’s closes because, well, there’s no one else around to run it. Meaning 250 weekdays a year they’re shoulder to shoulder, slinging udon.

Lydia says when she sees someone in line through the window, she wants that person at the counter and ordering within 3 minutes. Sometimes, though, the line doesn’t move as fast as she’d like.

“I trust him,” she says of Joe. “We have freedom. I can say (to my husband), ‘hey, do it faster,’ but if he’s my employee I can’t say that because that’s rude.”

She smiles again (because of course she does) before securing the top on another bowl of udon. Maybe the last one for today. But then again, maybe not.

Yo Yo’s is located at 318 Pacific Ave. in the Financial District. It’s open Mon-Fri from 10am-4pm.

Grant Marek is the Editorial Director of SFGATE. Email: grant.marek@sfgate.com | Twittter: @grant_marek