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A new Peninsula cafe won’t be brewing coffee or steeping tea – it’ll serve bone broth.
Trad Bone Broth turned heads with its San Francisco debut in 2022, and now it’s in the process of expanding to downtown Burlingame, with an expected opening in March. The small takeout-only cafe offers various broths on tap and uses these broths to craft made-to-order signature drinks ($11-$15). Some are savory and some are sweet, but all bone broths are made with 100% pasture-raised chicken and beef bones from farms practicing organic or regenerative agriculture, including Markegard Family Grass-Fed in Half Moon Bay and TomKat Ranch in Pescadero.
“We want to provide a really nourishing product in a really convenient form,” co-founder Jonathan Kim said.
A Minnesota native, Jonathan Kim moved to Seoul, South Korea, after graduating from college. During the six years he lived there, he developed a fascination and appreciation for Korea’s broth culture, noting that nearly every meal came with a bowl of soup or a cup of broth.
“I did a two-year gut reset diet once I found out about broth, where I was drinking broth every day for two years,” he said. “It just felt really good, just really felt nourished by it.”
After returning to the States, Jonathan Kim missed how accessible broth was, and he formed a business idea, convincing his brother David Kim to forgo law school to start Trad Bone Broth.
“It was a tough sell, but then doing all this very wholesome cooking and working with your hands probably just healed me of the need for prestige,” David Kim said.
The name Trad comes from the word “traditional,” representing the brothers’ commitment to create bone broth in an old-school way. Broth is simmered for 20 to 40 hours in kettles, not pressure cookers. Trad’s broth production process is completely plastic-free, as broth is packaged in stainless steel kegs and glass jars so that there are no micro plastics in the broth and no plastics in the trash bin.
“For us, a lot of the soul of bone broth is about doing what the grandmothers did,” David Kim said. “That wisdom of giving you chicken soup when you’re sick or when you’re recovering from an injury wasn’t spoken in scientific jargon, but is really this very sophisticated and passed-down wisdom that’s in every single culture around the world.”
To start their new venture, they decided to move out of the Midwest to San Francisco, where they thought broth culture would be more accepted and fit into the healthy California lifestyle.
“All our friends (in San Francisco) were like, ‘It’s kind of perfect broth weather because it’s always 10 degrees too cold,’” David Kim said.
Four broth varieties are available on tap: European beef broth, classic chicken broth, Korean-style creamy white beef broth (Seoul Broth) and a vegetarian option made of Pacific kombu ($9-$13). Jonathan Kim inherited the Seoul Broth recipe from a Korean chef, and he said it tastes more like milk than meat.
All four broths can be drunk as-is or crafted into beverages, including David Kim’s go-to, the Immunity Broth, made with the classic chicken broth, ginger, turmeric, black pepper, garlic and ginseng. For first-time broth drinkers, he recommends going sweet.
“The newbies to bone broth really need to try the sweet ones, because they’re 75% bone broth, full of protein and collagen, but it’s like drinking a sweet latte,” he said.
David Kim’s favorite sweet broth is the matcha, made with the Seoul Broth, housemade coconut milk, raw honey, ceremonial-grade matcha and vanilla. Other sweet options, available hot or iced, include the chai broth, Sweet Serenity broth (made with raw honey, lavender and vanilla), chocolate sea salt broth (made with regeneratively-sourced cacao) and peppermint cocoa broth. He explained these sweet broths taste like nourishing, more satiating cafe drinks.
“I know it sounds so weird and it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around, but, man, people try those and are just hooked, and the kiddos really love them too, which is super sweet to see,” David Kim said. “We’ve had 12-year-olds come in with their allowance money and be like, ‘I’m not doing boba this week because I wanted my bone broth.’”
In addition to beverages, Trad Bone Broth also offers soups packaged in Mason jars, including Korean beef soup, chicken wild rice soup and chicken pho ($24). New to the Burlingame store will be a selection of beauty and home products made from tallow, including candles, soap, sunbalm and other skincare products.
The Kims said that when they first opened Trad Bone Broth, people were very skeptical of the concept, but many skeptics have since become regulars. The Kims explained that people drink broth at all times of the day – some use it as a coffee substitute in the morning, others use it as a snack to hold them over until the next meal and others use broth for fasting.
“Our internal goal was to heal America’s gut,” David Kim said. “I think our menu is composed of these traditions that really helped us and nourished us … so that’s what we want to pass on.”
Trad Bone Broth, 1406 Burlingame Ave., Burlingame; Instagram: @tradbonebroth. Beginning March, open daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
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