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How Do You Start a Small Food Business in America's Most Expensive City? Ask La Cocina

As the tech bubble grows and long-time residents get displaced, so too does their food—but nonprofit culinary incubator La Cocina is fighting back.
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Photo by Alec Lesser

What do so many of our favorite new restaurants in the Bay Area have in common? For us the answer came slowly, as we sopped up the last tangy drops of Cambodian pork belly dip laced with fermented fish paste at Nite Yun’s Nyum Bai (one of our 2018 Hot 10 restaurants) in Oakland. As we tried to recreate the ideal crispy-to-chewy ratio of Reem Assil’s za’atar-dusted flatbread—found at her two award-winning Oakland restaurants, Reem’s and Dyafa—in our Test Kitchen. When we spotted Alicia Villanueva’s downy vegan tamales, so long a fixture at San Francisco farmers markets and food festivals, on the shelves at Whole Foods. The answer? All of these businesses originated in the same place, and that place is La Cocina.

San Francisco’s first nonprofit food incubator, led by Caleb Zigas and Leticia Landa, has more than just a lofty mission: to provide low income women of color the chance to succeed in a market most lack the resources to break into. It follows through on that mission. “We started La Cocina because the barriers to entry have always been high,” says executive director Zigas. “The changing dynamic of San Francisco only makes that more extreme.” By providing affordable kitchen space, technical training, marketing connections, and hands-on help with the nitty-gritty stuff—like permits and payroll—La Cocina is helping to level one of the nation’s most competitive playing fields, and proving that true wellness goes beyond what’s on our plates. It’s about the strength of our communities.

By summer, the nonprofit will take their 14-year endeavor to new heights by opening the La Cocina Municipal Market, a food hall in the Tenderloin filled with the businesses they helped foster. Here, we take a look back at some of La Cocina’s most successful alumni to date—and where they are now.

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    Guadalupe Guerrero

    When Guadalupe Guerrero arrived in the United States from her hometown of Guanajuato, Mexico, she landed a job at a taqueria in Berkeley. Within a few years, she was running the place. “But I was doing it for someone else,” she recalls, “and I thought, why not do this for myself?” Six years later, after going through the La Cocina incubator, she and her daughters, Brenda and Alejandra, own a full-fledged restaurant called El Pipila, which opened in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood in November. From the family recipe sopes to the bright, colorful design, the restaurant represents who the Guerreros are: past, present, and future. “Our first logo was based on El Pipila, a man with a monument in Guanajuato,” says Brenda. “The new one is all about a woman—our mom.”

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    Aileen Suzara

    Working in public health and nutrition, Aileen Suzara noticed something unsettling: Traditional, non-European foods were largely missing from mainstream conversations about wellness. “A lot of it was like ‘Everyone has to eat kale to be healthy,’ and I was like, ‘No there’s actually a whole array of healthy foods.’” In response, with the help of La Cocina, Suzara started Sariwa, a community food business that does catering, pop-ups, and all-ages workshops centered around healthy Filipino cooking. “So often in this work, you feel like you’re just bumbling through it alone, but to have specific guidance around starting a food business is so valuable,” she says. “La Cocina recognizes businesses that want to do more than just beautiful food. We’re honoring our roots.”

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    Binita Pradhan

    Today, Binita Pradhan employs 16 people at Bini’s Kitchen, a Nepalese take-out concept with two San Francisco locations, the latest of which just opened in December. Three employees make her famous momos full-time, producing about 60,000 of the juicy little dumplings each month. But it wasn’t always this way. Back in 2011, the Nepalese-born, Mumbai-trained chef ended a nine-year relationship marked by severe abuse and found herself fleeing to a domestic violence shelter in the Central Valley. “After that I moved in with my sister where I began cooking for clients,” she says. “I’d pack up my son in my Nissan Sentra and drive around delivering Nepalese food.” Then she found out about La Cocina, applied, and was accepted. As she expands, she hopes to use the platform to help other victims of domestic violence. “Every day is a challenge but it’s okay,” she says. “Without challenges, a human being is not complete.”

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    Reem Assil

    “Before La Cocina, I was hustling,” says Reem Assil. After a trip to her father’s native Syria, she returned hoping to start a Syrian food truck, maybe a bakery. “I was trying to manifest it but I was working like five jobs.” Then she joined La Cocina. “I had an aha moment working in the kitchen with all these women,” she says of her early days in the incubator. Observing how the larger businesses were able to employ and therefore help more people from their own communities, Assil began to think beyond food trucks, with the La Cocina team helping to guide the way. Today, the James Beard–nominated chef owns two critically-acclaimed Oakland restaurants inspired by her heritage: Reem’s and Dyafa. She employs more than 50 people. “I think about my life sometimes and I’m like, how did that happen? I don’t even remember,” she says. “For so many years I felt the impacts of racism against my community. Now I educate through food.”

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    Alicia Villanueva

    Every night after she finished cleaning houses and taking care of people with disabilities, Alicia Villanueva would lock herself in her tiny kitchen and cook tamales. Then she’d go out to the streets or the local church to sell them door to door. “But I wanted to be more formal, to find resources and learn how to grow a business in the United States,” she says. Joining La Cocina opened doors that once were closed and gave her the tools to make a business plan. During her time in the incubator, she grew her concept, Alicia's Tamales Los Mayas, little by little. Now, she has a 6,000-square foot factory and makes 40,000 tamales a month, selling to retailers like Whole Foods. “My goal is to go global,” she says. “I want to have tamale drive-throughs all over the world. But most of all, I want to help support my community.”

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    Nite Yun

    Born in a refugee camp in Thailand after her parents fled the Cambodian genocide, Nite Yun and her family moved to Stockton, California when she was two, and it was there that she grew up pounding lemongrass in the kitchen with her mom. “My parents didn’t talk much about Cambodia or the Khmer Rouge—those memories are too painful,” she says. “But when they do mention it, they talk about the golden era, the ’60s and early ’70s. It was a carefree time where there was music and life around them and art was celebrated.” It was this spirit that Yun found when she visited Cambodia the first time. “I wanted to bring that back, to have my parent’s generation and the younger generations celebrate this time, and hopefully heal as well.” So she quit her job as a nurse and started hosting dinners at her house, cooking the dishes she grew up eating, like rice noodle soup and prahok ktiss, a pork belly dip with fermented fish paste. “When I heard about La Cocina, I had no knowledge of operating a business, so I thought I’d never get in,” she says. But the organization saw her potential and kept reaching out until she agreed to cater a board meeting—which turned out to be an informal interview. She was accepted. “It was the abundance of resources I found at La Cocina that allowed me to open Nyum Bai,” says Yun. “I’m still learning, but having a good team really helps.”

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    Sicily Johnson

    “Everyone at La Cocina has a story,” says Sicily Johnson, who can trace her family back six generations. “My great-great-great grandfather was a slave on a plantation—he was the cook. My great grandmother had a restaurant called the Green Door. My mom went through the Bread Project [a bakery training program] in Berkeley. I went to culinary school. Cooking in our family—it’s been a thing.” Johnson and her mother, Bernadine Sewell, started at La Cocina in October 2017 and went straight into a pop-up space on UC Berkeley’s campus, where they run a food stand called Pinky & Red’s. “La Cocina is one of those unicorn things,” says Johnson, “where you’re like, ‘In 800 years we can...oh wait no, it’s happening now!’” At their food stall, the mother-daughter team turns intergenerational recipes into sandwiches. “We like to stretch the definition of what can go between two pieces of bread: collard greens, candied yams, fried chicken. It’s comfort food,” says Johnson. “At La Cocina, you dive headfirst into the deepest part of the ocean and see how you do. They believe you can swim.”

Hilary Cadigan is a James Beard nominated writer and the culture editor at Bon Appétit. She’s worked in magazines for more than a decade (yikes) and specializes in writing and editing long-form reported features, big editorial packages, and personal essays (bonus points if they are funny). She was born in... Read more
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