San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The smile behind S.F. shop Yasukochi’s Sweet Stop
‘Hatsy’ Yasukochi welcomed all to the bakery for 46 years
After a temporary closure due to the city’s shelterinplace order, Yasukochi’s Sweet Stop in San Francisco’s Japantown reopened recently, offering its classic pastries and muchlauded coffee crunch cake to dessert lovers once more. But the 46yearold bakery, designated a San Francisco Legacy Business last fall, will be going on without one of its original owners: Hatsuye “Hatsy” Yasukochi, who passed away due to complications from COVID19 on March 27. The Bay Area native had just celebrated her 80th birthday on March 7, surrounded by her family.
Albert Cheng, a retired educator and longtime San Franciscan, will always remember the cakes that Hatsy Yasukochi would decorate for his sons’ birthday parties in the ’70s, with elaborate superhero and cartoon motifs that she would provide free of charge. They were “absolutely stunning,” he says. The tiny bakery on Sutter Street that Yasukochi owned with her husband, Hisao “Moses” Yasukochi, was a frequent stop for Cheng and his family; not only for its pastries, but for the welcoming atmosphere that the couple cultivated.
“I love meeting people,” she told KTVU last fall. “I was decorating all their little children’s cakes, Minnie Mouse, Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Winnie the Pooh… Now it’s their children and their grandkids.”
Regulars and even just occasional seekers of coffee crunch cake remember Hatsy’s beaming smile, the first thing they would see as they entered the cozy bakery.
“I’ve seen her over 40some years,” Cheng says, “and we grew old together. I have never seen her not smile — it was a beautiful, crescent moonshape smile.”
The shop was the Yasukochis’ life, says daughter Erin Yamamura, whose father is now retired. “It was a way for them to be able to give to the people they cared about — to their family, to the community. They saw it as a way to be a part of the greater good.”
Born in 1940 in Oakland, Yasukochi was raised in Concord and Lafayette, though she had a significant parenthesis inserted into her childhood: Her family was forcibly displaced and interned at concentration camps in Rohwer, Ark., and Tulelake (Siskiyou County) from 1942 to 1945, the period of mass internment of Japanese Americans. Upon her family’s return to the East Bay, Yasukochi went on to attend Mount Diablo High in Concord and graduate from San Francisco State University. At 24, she married Moses Yasukochi, also known as Tom, a native San Franciscan and baker with whom she had three daughters: Stacey, Wendy and Erin.
In 1974, Moses was offered the opportunity to open a bakery inside of the American Fish Market (now the Super Mira Market) in Japantown; and thus, the Yasukochis’ Sweet Stop was born. From the beginning, the shop’s wares were classic American sweets like Swiss rolls filled with strawberry cream, Danishes and layer cakes — the most famous of which was the coffee crunch cake, modeled off of the famous one sold at Blum’s, a Bay Area pastry shop chain that went out of business in the 1970s.
The original, which is sometimes referred to as the Koffee Krunch Kake, was invented by Blum’s master baker Ernest Weil, and Moses picked up its technical intricacies from a colleague who used to work at the chain. While Moses prepared the cakes, pastries and cookies that filled the shop’s glass case, Hatsy was the face of the shop.
According to Yamamura, the shop was so important to her that her mother refused to retire: Even after the Yasukochis’ eldest grandson, Kenji Yick, took over the shop in 2017, her mother would still show up day after day. What of the customers who would miss the way she greeted them by name, or the children she’d sneak cookies to with a conspiratorial smile? Who would show off the classic pink Blum’s menu that she kept at the counter?
Hatsy was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer last year, Yamamura says, “but even through the chemotherapy treatments, she was still going to work, saying, ‘No, I have to go in.’” After 45 years of commanding the counter at Yasukochi’s Sweet Stop, Hatsy finally stepped away shortly after Christmas when her health issues got in the way.
Yamamura says her family plans to hold a celebration of life for her mother, but they’re unsure of exactly when, considering the pandemic. Still, those who wish to honor Yasukochi’s memory can do so by visiting the bakery. “I hope that people remember her smile and remember her for her kindness and generosity. Basically, to not just be a statistic of COVID19.”