Two years ago, Efrain Gomez was living in Lodi and grappling with alcohol and substance abuse issues that began when he was 14.
Today, the 43-year-old spends his days dicing fruit and roasting sweet potatoes in the kitchen at the St. Anthony Foundation, a nonprofit in the Tenderloin. Gomez, who grew up in the Central Valley, where his father ran a Mexican restaurant, is a graduate of the foundation’s Father Alfred Center, a free, yearlong, residential addiction treatment program. After graduating in January, he chose to stay and work in the kitchen, where he could channel his culinary skills into serving meals to the community he had depended on during treatment.
But if you ask him what he’s most proud of, he doesn’t talk about graduation day or even the first morning he woke up sober. He talks about birria.
During his first week as a cook at the foundation, the staff were struggling to decide what to serve to the unhoused and food-insecure San Franciscans who fill the spacious dining room three days a week for breakfast, lunch, and a hot afternoon snack. As his colleagues floated ideas, Gomez’s mind drifted to slow-cooked beef.
So he made a suggestion: They should cook birria, a traditional Mexican stew made with meat, chiles, and garlic, and served with cilantro and onion that he loved as a child.
“I didn’t think the head chef was going to go for it, but she let me do it,” Gomez recalls. “When I walked into the dining room and smelled the birria, it just reminded me of being home. I was missing the restaurant, missing my family, and smelling that brought back a lot of warm feelings.”
Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
For 75 years, the St. Anthony Foundation has helped thousands of San Franciscans who need a safe place to get a warm plate of food. Since Friar Alfred Boeddeker opened the doors in 1950, the foundation has served more than 49 million meals to San Franciscans facing homelessness and food insecurity.
This year the work is more important than ever. More than 1.8 million Bay Area residents struggle to cover basic needs, including groceries, according to a study (opens in new tab) from Tipping Point Community, a nonprofit founded by Mayor Daniel Lurie. The strain has been compounded for Bay Area residents who rely on SNAP benefits due to disruptions during the longest government shutdown in history, which left thousands scrambling to find food. In a region where approximately 1 million residents live in poverty despite having full-time jobs, according to Tipping Point, the need for the foundation’s services is expected to continue to grow.
Sally Haims, St. Anthony’s chief marketing and communications officer, says the foundation is ramping up its work to meet that need. St. Anthony’s dining room is serving roughly 2,400 meals a day — up 17% from early October. On Thursday, the foundation will host its Thanksgiving meal service, at which a small army of staff and volunteers will serve more than 2,400 plates of roasted turkey, French green beans, freshly baked challah rolls, and chocolate cake.
“We’re very disheartened and saddened for our community, but like our founders, the Franciscans, we plan ahead,” Haims said. “We saw this potentially coming, so we prepared to step up as we have over the last 75 years to meet the rising need. We’re known as the safety net below the safety net.”
Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
St. Anthony’s was able to quickly ramp up its food services to meet the increased demand thanks to donations from Bay Area residents and grants from corporate partners, including Dolby Laboratories.
At the Tenderloin dining room, St. Anthony aims to serve hearty meals like pork ribs and chicken adobo, plus pastries and breads via a baking program that launched two years ago. Gomez and the other 28 foundation cooks bake bread each morning and are experimenting with recipes for zucchini flatbread and focaccia.
“This isn’t just some soup kitchen — it’s a dining room,” Gomez says. “All of the chefs here are very talented, and they come from talented backgrounds, and they choose to be here. Because at the end of the day, it feels good to do something for the community.”
But it’s not just the cooks who make the dining room special. The foundation welcomes 5,000 volunteers each year, and contributors like Beryl Voss, 92, are at the heart of the operation. Voss has been volunteering at St. Anthony’s twice a week for almost 10 years. For her, volunteering isn’t just about serving meals; it’s about connection. She knows many of the guests by name, remembers their preferences, and greets them with a smile that turns each lunch into a moment of community.
“The guests are family,” Voss says. “You know them, they know you, and really it’s a friendship.”
She has no plans to end her tenure anytime soon.
“The most important part of my life is St. Anthony’s,” Voss says. “I am having hip replacement surgery at the end of January, and I told the doctor that I cannot be immobile for more than a month, because I have to go to St. Anthony’s.”