Tae Kim

Coming Up

At SORO SORO Coffee & Dessert, Tae Kim has held the co-owner and operator role since 2019, working in a Korean café register where sweetness is managed rather than pushed. The menu lines up sweet milk teas, Stumptown-bean espresso drinks, and desserts that stay restrained in their sweetness, avoiding anything heavy or loud. That balance gives the café its shape: delicate, playful, and tightly composed.

Where They Are Now

At SORO SORO Coffee & Dessert, Tae Kim’s current work centers on Adorable Korean café desserts and cute design lattes, a pairing that has become central to the shop’s appeal. What reads at first as a detail became a larger draw than expected, giving the menu a visual pull that works alongside the food rather than around it. The lattes add charm without crowding the desserts, so each order contributes to the room’s overall feel. The signature work is the Snow Affogato, a two-foot-high pile of white cotton candy set over a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Espresso is poured through the cotton candy, and the white mass slowly collapses into the dessert below. The structure depends on contrast: height against density, heat against cold, anticipation against collapse. The result is staged in plain view before the first spoonful lands. That sequence—height, heat, cold, collapse—captures the logic of Tae Kim’s approach at SORO SORO Coffee & Dessert, where presentation is part of the service, not an afterthought. The guest sees the dessert change before tasting it, and that change is built into the experience. The café’s appeal sits in that balance between the cute and the exact, the whimsical and the carefully composed.

Signature

Tae's signature dishes include Snow Affogato.

In Their Words “We knew there will be some customers who like cute design lattes, but it was a lot more than our expectations.”