Pastry chefs, even the best of them, rarely roll in the dough. Fortunately for Michelle Polzine, money has never been important — at least “not in the way that it is to most people,” she says.
That’s true of her past lives as a political activist and a punk guitarist, and of her gigs as a dishwasher and line cook. It’s even true of her name-making stint as the owner of the acclaimed 20th Century Café — an ode to Eastern Europe, touted for its 10-layer honey cake. Though it was a James Beard Award semifinalist in 2019, the café became a Covid casualty and closed in 2021 after Polzine underwent cancer surgery and, as she says, “reevaluated everything.”
Now, three years later, San Francisco’s vintage-apron-clad baking star is back to cooking for the public — and making bupkes, nothing — at a spot you’ve likely never heard of: City Hope Cafe, a completely free table-service restaurant and café in the Tenderloin that serves up food and coffee as well as medical and housing support. Polzine and her fellow volunteers are nourishing the neighborhood, offering an elevated experience most clientele aren’t used to. And she’s never been happier.
A soup kitchen City Hope Cafe is not. “It’s like a real place,” says Polzine, “where people are hanging out, having their coffee and pastry, like everybody else in fucking San Francisco.” One obvious difference: The coffee and pastries don’t cost patrons a cent.
Founded as a nonprofit in 2015, City Hope operates programs throughout the Tenderloin, including a 25-room sober house, a grocery delivery program, a community center that does dinner and a movie (sometimes bingo or karaoke) two nights a week, and — since last year — the café on Ellis Street.
The café looks like any other, with wooden two-tops, a communal farm table, even a fancy La Marzocco espresso machine behind the brass bar. Because this is San Francisco, there are oat-milk lattes on the menu, and the coffee is of the fancy third-wave variety, donated by Sightglass, Verve, Linea, and the like. The spot is open to anyone who “wants to come in and sit with us,” says manager Paige MacLaren.
After closing her own café, Polzine tried taking pottery classes. (“Like every lost person in America,” she laughs.) She taught Zoom baking classes. (“Hated that! It was like talking into death.”) She pulled espressos for friends at Dynamo Donuts. (“I thought, ‘I’ll go be a barista! That’ll be fun!’ It wasn’t.”)
She was flailing. “I was trying to find the meaning of the universe in all of this, and it wasn’t going very well,” she says. So Polzine did what any San Franciscan might do: She spoke to her acupuncturist, who recommended that she try giving back and help serve dinner one night at City Hope’s Olive Street location.
City Hope founder Reverend Paul Trudeau was there that night. He knew Polzine was a pastry chef and made his pitch. “He came up to me smiling and said, ‘There are other ways you could help,’” she says. Suddenly, City Hope had itself a revered pastry chef as a regular part-time volunteer.
At the end of August, Polzine took over some of the café’s tiny kitchen. She brought in her own cake pans, lugged a 20-quart mixer downstairs, set her little plastic strawberry timer on the shelf, and filled a Superman mug with kosher salt. Then she began reaching out to chef friends for large-format pastry recipes: Atlantic Beach pie from North Carolina legend Bill Smith; streusel-topped chichi muffins from French Laundry alum Shuna Lydon; and a scone recipe from Kathleen Kwuan, formerly of the Anchovy Bar. Polzine’s good friend Nicole Krasinski, co-owner of State Bird Provisions and the Progress, donated a bag of muscovado sugar for butterscotch pudding.
Today, Polzine volunteers three days a week. “Better than the 120 hours I used to work!” she laughs. On a late-October morning, she decides to make her signature honey cake for City Hope for the first time. She usually sells these cakes for $250 via email or Instagram. Here, it’s tweaked to feed 150 lucky souls for free.
To stay within City Hope’s budget, Polzine has learned to utilize leftovers from food banks, including flats of imperfect pears and bunches of commercial bananas. But she’d rather know what’s coming when, and from where. “I’m a pastry chef! I need control!” She looks at the food system holistically, which means she still wants the good stuff. It doesn’t matter to her that City Hope’s guests might be putting fentanyl in their bodies; to her mind, they deserve organic flour, too.
To get the better stuff, she supplements the budget City Hope gives her by procuring products donated by friends — hitting up contacts in the restaurant industry for whatever they’ve got that she can use. Apples from Statebird’s farm? She’ll turn them into flaky tarts. Subpar plums? She’ll slow-roast them and bake them into buttery cornmeal scones.
The other day, she biked off from Dynamo Donuts with a bunch of donated egg whites that went straight into a coconut sheet cake for that night’s dessert. Sometimes, a friend forks over a cash donation that can provide City Hope with pastries for a whole week — around $500, she estimates.
Polzine’s quest to serve the best at City Hope falls in line with Trudeau’s vision of service: the concept of “radical hospitality.” It’s all about exceeding people’s expectations, “giving them the kind of customer service they can’t afford,” he explains.
At typical soup kitchens, patrons are treated as numbers — bodies that are counted and hurried in and out. Here, customers are referred to as guests and are intentionally, repeatedly, called by name. Essentially, the experience is the opposite of what often happens to these same people at other cafés around the city: getting kicked out.
The 160-plus guests who come through the café on this Wednesday morning make a motley crew: a lapdog-toting dude in sunglasses, who keeps dozing off; a gray-bearded ex-con suing his SRO for its drug- and rat-infested, black-mold conditions; a dreadlocked lady, nomadic by choice. A jittery woman in jeggings walks in armed with a purple orchid and plastic tub of Coffee-Mate. No need: Clover half-and-half awaits, as do packets of sugar, with a three-per-person limit. “Our guests looove sugar,” says MacLaren, a coffee obsessive who runs the café and offers free barista training to volunteers.
“Here you go, John,” says a server to an affable disabled man, a regular, setting down a leaf-adorned latte and a fat slice of apple tart. “Oh, look at that! It’s still warm!” John beams, admiring the tart like a piece of art.
“We’re so lucky,” says the homeless man in a wheelchair. “A hot cup of coffee. A Michelin-star pastry chef.” (Actually, a three-time Beard nominee, but still.)
Soon, John’s apple tart is gone. But not John. He stays, chatting, reading, watching an old Western on TV. He wheels himself out just before the café’s 11 a.m. closing. He’ll be back in time for dinner and dessert — which he’s told will be banana pudding. (Polzine’s version is layered with diplomat cream and leftover honey cake crumbles.) “My favorite!” says John, clasping his hands like a kid. “This place makes you feel like you’re in a real restaurant. It makes you feel like a person again.”
Polzine gets it. Finally, she too feels something she hasn’t in a while: whole. “I can figure out how to live on no money,” she says. “But I can’t live any longer feeling undervalued.”
- Website
- www.cityhopesf.org