Joe Tan met me at the door clad in a dark chef’s uniform and a black Giants ball cap and asked if I wanted a glass of water. We sat outside and the sky spat rain and smiled sun at us off and on for about half an hour before retiring to a reasonable gray. It cast no light over Eureka, which we had a fantastic view of from Rooftop Sushi’s patio.

There is nothing extraneous on that patio, nothing to distract diners from the food laid out in front of them or of Old Town stretching away from them. That is the way Tan likes it: Clean. Perfect. Precise. The way Tan — the owner of Rooftop Sushi, Curry Leaf and the soon-to-be-opened Kokoro Ramen — makes his food is the same. 

It would not be much hyperbole to call Tan Humboldt’s Asian restaurant kingpin. Besides those three, he used to own Nori in Arcata and moved to Eureka to work at Bayfront about 10 years ago. 

Despite the expansive portfolio, Tan does not at all see himself as a restaurateur. He is a chef trapped in the Iron Maiden of business management. 

“I love to serve the customer,” Tan said. “I don’t like to own the business. It’s a lot of headaches.”

“As a chef, I can work 20 hours, 24 hours — just need to sleep. I have no stress. As a chef, I work, and then at the end of the night, [I] drink beer, drink sake, and pass out. Next day, wake up and work.”

Tan, 44, didn’t really end up in Eureka by choice — it was the end result of a long, meandering journey that started in a village in Malaysia a few hours from Kuala Lumpur, where he worked in his family’s noodle restaurant. When he was 17, he found a job cooking in New York City, then bounced to Japan for six years, where he fell in love with both sushi and Japanese culture. 

“Everything is amazing,” Tan said. “Everything is clean and really looks nice. Tastes good. It’s very precise. It’s a mental thing…You see something is made in Japan, you know what the quality is. It’s healthier too, especially sushi. Japanese taste is lighter, not heavier like American food — mostly deep fried. Same thing with Chinese food. Mostly deep fried.”

If he had infinite resources, he would start a Japanese-style ramen place without human staffing. It would be serviced by a ticket machine. Customers pick up a number, wait for their food to be done, and pick it up at the counter when it’s done. Tan, long tired of the immense costs and tiny profit margins inherent to the business, would welcome the reprieve. 

He’s trying to capture the vibe of a Japanese alleyway with Kokoro Ramen by situating it in Old Town’s Opera Alley. Noodles are also Tan’s thing (“We love noodles. You can eat noodles every day”), and he’s been waiting to open up a ramen place since COVID derailed his plans in 2020. 

Don’t expect him to stick around for too long. Tan’s not much of a fan of Eureka. He doesn’t like the lack of nightlife and what a ghost town Eureka is after about 10 p.m. Tan is a city man who is stuck until his kids graduate high school and he can move down to the Bay. 

“Besides fishing and hiking — what are we gonna do here?” Tan asked. “I’m from the city. Lot of activity to do there. Here? There’s nothing.”

Even with all of the restaurants he has owned or does own or will own, Tan still thinks of himself as a chef, as the guy in the back with a knife in his hand instead of the overworked paper-pusher with a pen. 

“I like to make good food and satisfy people, to [see] the happiness in their face,” Tan said. “The compliment made me happy. It’s not about money. The business person, the owner, they think about money, how they make profit, but I’m the opposite. I just want [to make] the people happy. It’s my only goal.”