FORAGER: HOW A SAN FRANCISCO COMMUNITY SAVED ITS NEIGHBORHOOD DINER.
Neighborhood saves its beloved breakfast spot
Chuck Dee, who has lived in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood for 55 of his 65 years, still takes his place at the counter of Breakfast at Tiffany’s every Monday morning, reading the news on his iPad. “I’ve been coming here since this was a doughnut shop called the Pastry Express,” he says. That was almost 40 years ago. There was a year, though, that Dee had to take off from his twice-weekly ritual: the year that Breakfast at Tiffany’s closed.
It may seem like the diner — the great American gathering spot — is dying off in San Francisco, a city that increasingly brunches rather than plops itself at the counter for scrambled eggs and coffee refills. Manor Coffee Shop, (the old) Uncle’s Cafe, the Video Cafe, the Lucky Penny, Joe’s Cable Car: gone. Breakfast at Tiffany’s almost followed them into the land of black-and-white photos and bitter nostalgia. Then the city, and the neighborhood residents, stepped in.
In September 2013, Gerald Adan, who had owned the restaurant since 1978, died of cancer. For 35 years “Jerry” had presided over the restaurant from the griddle, says Dee, who can point at the ghost seats where regulars he knew once perched. Adan, who ran the business for many years with his partner, Gary, didn’t shy away from politics. The conversations could get loud and stereophonic, voices from all over the room. The fare, Dee says, was “truck-stop style food, but with fresher ingredients. Nothing came from a can.”
After Adan died, April Martin, his sister, wanted to take over (the restaurant is named after her daughter Tiffany). But the elderly owner of the building decided she was ready to sell and refused to renew the lease. “It was much more than a business,” Martin wrote on the sign she pasted on the window telling customers the diner was gone. “It became a second home where deep and lasting bonds were formed with each other and our customers.”
Kash Feng bought the building in October 2013 as an investment. The owner of several Japanese restaurants in San Francisco — Live Sushi, Omakase and now Okane — Feng was a Portola resident who had seen San Bruno Avenue parking grow scarce and the sidewalk traffic thicken. He’d
stopped by the old Breakfast at Tiffany’s a few times, but never became a regular. “It was old,” he says. “Greasy. Everything’s broken, and it didn’t even have gas for the stove to cook.”
The Xi’an-born entrepreneur decided that the corner of San Bruno and Thornton avenues was a good location for a Northern Chinese pulled-noodle-and-dumpling spot, especially given the current density of Asian businesses.
Soon after the sale, Jack Tse, then corridor manager for the Portola Neighborhood Association, which is part of the city’s Office of Workforce and Economic Development, approached Feng. “I speak to the folks a lot,” Tse says, “and people were just wanting that history to be retained and have a social space for the neighborhood.”
Tse told Feng that reopening Breakfast at Tiffany’s would guarantee success. Feng shrugged it off. But as he remodeled the space, stripping it down to the studs, neighbors kept stopping by to ask him if “Tiffy’s” was going to reopen. People he’d never seen. So many, in fact, that midway through the remodel he switched gears. The city sweetened the deal by contributing money from its “SF Shines” program to help paint the building and buy a new sign.
It took a year to renovate the space, moving the tiny, electric kitchen back to a self-enclosed room and reconstructing the dining area. Feng kept only the counter but refinished it, and had to order the swivel seats from the East Coast. He replaced the flattop with a whole-fruit orange juicer and a painting of Jerry and Tiffany. One of the old cooks agreed to come back, and Feng promoted one of his Live Sushi servers to be manager.
Word went out that the restaurant would reopen on Nov. 1, 2014, and it was greeted with a line out the door. Fifteen months in, Feng has no regrets about his decision. Business is steady — better than steady on weekends.
Dee meets up with three longtime regulars at Breakfast at Tiffany’s every Sunday morning, then comes alone on Mondays. He says the old crowd has dispersed a bit, but he sees new regulars, faces from the neighborhood who come almost as often as he does.
Dee misses the feeling that Breakfast at Tiffany’s was an open door you could always walk through, a feeling he grew up with in the neighborhood when it was populated by big Italian, Irish and Maltese Catholic families. But he appreciates the absence of raucous political debates. (“It’s more cordial,” he says.) The food’s still good. And the cooks accommodate his diet now that he’s gone Paleo.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s: 2499 San Bruno Ave. (at Thornton Avenue), San Francisco, (415) 468-8805, http://breakfastattiffanyssf.com.