San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
FOUR WHO MADE THE PANDEMIC PIVOT
These Bay Area residents found new careers — by choice or necessity
As the shifting quicksand of the COVID19 pandemic has upended our lives, many Bay Area residents, by choice or necessity, have undergone a professional metamorphosis. For some, jobs disappeared with the shutdowns. Others saw a chance to make their side hustle full time. And some have seized the opportunity to pursue a dream that might otherwise have never seen the light of day. The Chronicle spoke with people who made a pandemicinduced professional pivot about why they made the leap, what they miss about their former lives and what they think their future holds.
Bryan Garza
Before: Technology project manager at UCSF
Now: Director of facilities at Filoli Historic House and Garden
“It’s like a game of WhacAMole,” says Bryan Garza of his new position, coordinating upkeep and events for the 645acre property, which includes a 16acre garden and a historic mansion. As director of facilities at Filoli in Woodside, a role he took in May, Garza spends his days checking irrigation systems, facilitating lighting and sound for outdoor microweddings and maintaining a fleet of carts, trucks and tractors for the property’s 14 horticulturalists. The job came with a cottage on the estate, so he moved to the pastoral area with his wife and baby.
It’s a far cry from his previous life. Before making the move to Filoli, Garza lived a musicoriented life in San Francisco, writing songs and performing with his band, Scissors for Lefty, by night and managing projects and maintenance at UCSF by day. His 2015 wedding to his wife and fellow musician Rebecca GarzaBortman was structured as a rock opera and featured the couple performing an album they composed together at storied San Francisco music venue the Chapel. It was covered by “Entertainment Tonight” and the New York Times.
But the charms of the city palled when COVID19 arrived and Garza and his wife confronted the difficulty of raising a child in a radically altered metropolis. “When we were a month into COVID, I heard about this job at Filoli,” he says. “The idea of living in the woods, walking half a mile to work down a treelined path every day, and having my child grow up surrounded by nature was suddenly very interesting.”
His selfdescribed impostor syndrome got in the way at first, but Garza drafted a creative application, and after a few conversations with Filoli’s chief of operations, the job was his.
Leaving his old role was a wrench. “I felt like I was on top of my game at UCSF,” he says. “It’s easy to feel like you miss what you’re competent at, and there’s so much to learn here at Filoli. It’s kind of like being in a new relationship. Where are the well pumps in the ground? Where does the electricity come from? It’s hard to come in and not be able to turnkey everything.” From being on the watch for rattlesnakes and mountain lions, to numerous bouts with poison oak,
Garza has had a lot to learn about rural life. “We’re glampers, not campers!” he says. “It’s been a really big shift from the city.”
Despite the challenges, Garza has no desire to return to his previous life. “I want the book of my life to have a lot of varied chapters. The threecar garage and 40 years of stability is not my goal — I want to be a little scrappier than that.”
And scrappiness aside, Garza has found that his current chapter fulfills him. “I have to take a pause sometimes and realize that I’m getting paid to have this crazy adventure.”
Maxwell Sugarman
Before: Chef de cuisine at Bull Valley Roadhouse Now: MBA program student/ bank teller During his five years as a chef, Maxwell Sugarman made his living on the line. He cooked in restaurants from Copenhagen to Japan and did stints in top Bay Area kitchens like Petit Crenn and Ramen Shop. At the end of 2019, he began working as the chef de cuisine at the Bull Valley Roadhouse, an oldtimey, farmers’ marketoriented restaurant in Port Costa, a historic railroad town just across from Benicia on the banks of the Carquinez Strait. A career behind the stove seemed to be his future — he was considering opening a restaurant and was looking at potential spaces with Bull Valley’s owners as recently as January.
But as the pandemic hit, Sugarman could see the difficulties that would engulf the restaurant industry, and rethought his plans. He left his chef position at Bull Valley just weeks after the first shutdown began in March. “If COVID hadn’t happened, I would be opening a new restaurant right now, living a completely different life,” Sugarman says. “It’s easy to get stuck and just keep doing the same thing, but I’m going to be 30 this year, and restaurants aren’t an older person’s game. The pandemic put me in a situation where I had to dive in headfirst and make a change.”
In April, Sugarman started an online MBA program at St. Mary’s College. Through an alum, he landed a job with Provident Credit Union and is now working as a teller at its Redwood City bank while completing his graduate coursework online. Provident is paying for a portion of his schooling, and Sugarman sees the finance industry as his future.
“After I complete my MBA program, I think the credit union is where I want to be long term,” he says. “I really like their community ethos as a financial coop.”
The connection between a restaurant kitchen and the financial services world might seem tenuous and counterintuitive, but the skills needed to keep things flowing smoothly during dinner service and the ability to connect with customers are serving him well in his new job. “There’s a lot of similarities between this and the hospitality industry, and a lot of transferable skills,” Sugarman says. COVID has inspired Sugarman to rethink other aspects of his life, too. “When I was cooking, it was very much day to day,” he says. “Getting away from that has helped me look for more longevity, and now I’m focused on making decisions that are stable long term.” His next steps include taking advantage of the pandemicinduced price drops in San Francisco’s rental market and moving back into the city from the East Bay.
Overall, Sugarman is deeply grateful for the new route his professional path has taken. “It takes a lot of intestinal fortitude to jump into something you have no experience in, and everything happened really fast, but it’s been an awesome decision,” he says. “I feel really fortunate about how things played out. You get a lot of options by just saying yes and trying things.”
Isabella Hill
Before: Preschool teacher Now: Fashion designer When the pandemic hit, the shape of Isabella Hill’s days shifted dramatically: She went from the joyful chaos of teaching 3and 4yearold children at a San Francisco preschool to working alone with fabric, needle and thread.
A preschool teacher for 10 years, Hill started making clothing on the side when she graduated from college ( she has collaborated with designers and brands like Evan Kinori and Creatures of Comfort). But when the pandemic closed her school, it forced her to make the shift to fulltime designer. “It seemed like a good moment to start focusing on the creative part of myself that had been on the backseat while I was teaching,” she says. “I would never have had the courage or desire to do it full time but for the pandemic.”
Her online clothing store, Landbreakers ( launched as a side project in 2015), bills itself as Western wear and features designs that range from tiered “Little House on the Prairie” dresses in oldfashioned prints to cheeky embroidery on vintage organza aprons and Levi’s denim jackets.
Since the coronavirus has increased our time at home, and wardrobes have shifted from suits to sweatpants,
( the Danish word for
cozy) has become Hill’s inspiration. Softer fabrics and lounge wear have replaced the specialoccasion clothing she used to focus on, though the designs are still infused with her signature handwork and embroidery. “My goal is always to make something that’s heirloom quality, not disposable, that you will want to pass on to future generations. I want to challenge people’s relationships with the products they buy,” she says.
Hill still sees teaching as her calling, though she’s unsure how or when she will return to it. “I absolutely miss my relationships with the children. When I walk around and see kids in the park, I miss playing with them so much,” she says. “But the school I taught at is in no way the same, so what I did before just isn’t there for me to go back to right now.”
The pandemic has also inspired Hill’s other goals — she’s in the midst of applying to graduate school, hoping to pursue a master’s degree in education policy. “Preschool teachers were one of the first sectors to go back to work,” she says. “They were being treated as disposable and were super underpaid while being put on the front lines of this epidemic. Seeing how they were treated during this time has inspired me to get a degree in policy.”
Jeff Hester
Before: Brand manager at Fort Point Beer Co.
Now: Founder of Pantry Champ, a bottledcocktail company
In early 2020, Jeff Hester was in the midst of revamping San Francisco’s Black Sands Brewpub and preparing to relaunch the brand as a specialty line of beer. Then the pandemic hit. The project was put on hold, and he was laid off from Fort Point Beer Co. along with most of the staff.
The experience might have been devastating to some, but Hester saw it as a challenge. He drew on his experience as a mixologist and expanded his longtime practice of making cocktail mixers for friends into a business. Pantry Champ, a pandemic-inspired line of bottled cocktails, was born on March 24.
The bottles are distinctive, with tongueincheek names and blackandwhite labels. ( Hester used to handwrite them; now they’re printed.) The logo he designed — a vintage image of a clasped pair of hands — references his inspiration. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we were all scared to see each other, so I wanted to give my industry friends a liquid handshake,” he says.
Hester’s recipes are unique and memorable. Take the Staycay, a blend of candy cap mushroom syrup, aged orange bitters and dried green mango powder that replicates the tropical flavor of a mai tai. Or Inside Sweater, which includes a green hazelnut inf used tincture blended with macadamia nut syrup, pressed apple and aromatic bitters. The company also offers limitededition spice blends and merchandise with the Pantry Champ logo.
Pantry Champ’s fun flavor profiles created a cultlike following as home cocktail making exploded during the shutdown. “At the beginning of the pandemic, people would order two to four bottles at a time, but now they’re ordering 10 or 20 bottles because they’re shelf stable,” Hester says. He delivers in the Richmond and Sunset neighborhoods by bicycle and to the rest of San Francisco and outside the city via car once a week. The business accounts for 30% 50% of Hester’s monthly income — the rest comes from consulting gigs with bars and restaurants.
Despite the company’s success, Hester is conflicted about his new path. “If 2020 hadn’t happened, I would still be at Fort Point,” he says. “I was really enjoying it. And I miss being a part of the industry world on a daily basis, going into bars and restaurants and seeing the same cast of characters each week. Whether you’re front or back of the house, a lot of us stay in this industry because of the community.”
Hester hopes to expand his company while staying true to Pantry Champ’s roots as a homegrown, neighborhood business. He isn’t sure how things will work out once the dust settles.
“It’s a very scary time right now, going into this second shutdown,” he says. “A lot of people in the restaurant and bar world are questioning where we will go from here if we don’t get some support. Anyone who is committed to the food and beverage industry is going to stick around, but we need to assess all our options and figure out how to survive.”