La Mejor Bakery in the Mission matters now more than ever
Jonathan Kauffman Aug. 2, 2018 Updated: Aug. 2, 2018 6:57 p.m.
1of9(From left to right) Lisenia Rivera, Reina Orellana, Carmen Elias, Miriam Huerta, and Claudia Rojas pose for a portrait at La Mejor Bakery in San Francisco. The establishment has been owned by Elias for 25 years. Elias, who was born in Mexico and moved here in the 1960s, turned her bakery into an information hub for her Spanish-speaking customers and fellow business owners.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
2of9Carmen Elias poses for a portrait at La Mejor Bakery.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
3of9Carmen Elias converses with a customer at La Mejor Bakery.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
4of9A customer leaves La Mejor Bakery..Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
5of9Carmen Elias converses with a customer at La Mejor Bakery in San Francisco. The establishment has been owned by Elias for 25 years. Elias, who was born in Mexico and moved here in the 1960s, turned her bakery into an information hub for her Spanish-speaking customers and fellow business owners.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
6of9Claudia Rojas, left, carries a tray as she works with owner, Carmen Elias, at La Mejor Bakery.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
7of9Baked cookies rest in the window at La Mejor Bakery.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
8of9La Mejor Bakery, located at 3329 24th St., in San Francisco.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
9of9La Mejor Bakery, located at 3329 24th St.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
Carmen Elias would never have met the mayor — two mayors, in fact — if the city hadn't offered to help out her La Mejor Bakery. Now she's determined to return the favor, acting as a conduit between local government and her neighbors in the Mission.
In her early 60s, Elias' dark hair is streaked with blond highlights and her voice has retained the clear, melodic tone of a violin sonata. Social Security has begun sending her notices letting her know she could retire — for the second time — but she sets them aside, every year.
The first time she retired was when she was 39. In 1993, the Bank of America, where Elias had worked since the age of 19, offered early retirement to anyone who had been with the company for 20 years. Her husband of 15 years had died four years before. She had no kids. She took the buyout.
But what do you do with your life when you retire before 40? One of her father's old co-workers suggested she take over a failing panaderia on 24th Street, not far from where she grew up.
Carmen Elias converses with a staff member at La Mejor Bakery.
Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
Elias had moved to San Francisco in 1968 with her family, when her father, who was working for Marriott in Mexico City, was transferred to the U.S. He secured visas for his wife and children and rented a three-bedroom apartment in the Mission for $350 a month, if you can imagine. But he was soon forced to make that bargain this country forces on so many immigrants: To stay here you have to give up a lifetime's worth of professional achievements. From the office he returned to the trade he had practiced as a young man: baking pastries. King's, La Victoria, Dominguez and other Mission shops all employed him before he died at the age of 52.
His daughter had grown up around the panaderias but had never wanted to work in them. But she knew she was good with people. The family friend helped her recruit her father's former colleagues to bake for her on their days off. In return, she named her new business after his: La Mejor. Buying the business took all her money. "I only saw the check in my hand and then I had to give it away," she says now.
The first two years, Elias made no money and couldn't afford to hire full-time staff. She would open the store at 5 o'clock to catch the early-morning customers not served by the seven other neighborhood bakeries, take a few hours off in the middle of the day to sleep, then work until midnight to attract the bargoers. She dispensed trays' worth of free cookies to bring them back.
Around the time that business picked up, a 17-year-old who had just moved from Mexico applied for a job. "I know everything about baking," Rigoberto Calzada told her. She hired him — and for 20 years, until he opened his own bakery in San Bruno this spring, he was her only full-time baker.
Baked cookies rest in the window at La Mejor Bakery.
Elias still comes in at 4 in the morning on weekdays to help the crew pull trays of breads and pastries from the ovens. A line of customers forms outside her door even before 5 a.m.: first, workers picking up tamales and savory breakfast sandwiches, then parents with their schoolchildren for pan dulce. Around 9, the "computer people" stop in for pre-work custard turnovers and slices of pumpkin-nut bread. Saturdays and Sundays, Elias says, are more relaxed. She only comes in for the late morning or afternoon.
The middle of the day, before the afterwork rush for cookies and other sweets, is social hour at La Mejor. The paleta sellers park their carts outside for an hour before jingling their way back up Mission Street. Older men claim the tables for cups of weak coffee and cross-table gossip, which her full-time worker, Lisenia "Chiquitita" Rivera, stokes from behind the counter. Elias presides over the conversation. "They want to know what has happened and they ask me," she says, so she makes sure to keep up on the day's news, translating it into Spanish.
About three years ago, after a rash of ADA-compliance lawsuits filed against small businesses in the Mission, the city reached out to her and her neighbors, offering grants and assistance. With the grant, Elias installed a new door and rebuilt the tables and coffee station in her narrow shop so wheelchairs could fit under them.
In the process, she befriended Diana Ponce de Leon, Mission District point person for the city's Office of Economic and Workforce Development. The two struck up a relationship that Ponce de Leon considers familial. "She calls me at least once a month to see how everything is going," Ponce de Leon says. "She keeps her ear to the ground, if there are issues with small businesses, and lets me know what's happening."
(From left to right) Miriam Huerta, Lisenia Rivera, Gonzalo Morales (Carmen Elias's brother), and Carmen Elias pose for a portrait at La Mejor Bakery. The establishment has been owned by Elias for 25 years. Elias, who was born in Mexico and moved here in the 1960s, turned her bakery into an information hub for her Spanish-speaking customers and fellow business owners.
Elias' corner of the Mission is a small one, it turns out. She buys half of her supplies from local businesses — cheese, plastic goods, produce — and they return the favor. Most of her seven employees actually have jobs at nearby restaurants, taking extra shifts at La Mejor just as her father's friends did 25 years before. Sometimes it feels like the same dollars circle around the neighborhood, she says.
The business owners all talk to one another about the rents, of course, tracking every hike and eviction. But recently, they've been talking about immigration, too. Elias attended meetings the city held to educate the Mission about the prospect of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. "The community was scared," she said. "Maybe a lot of my customers don't have documents."
She learned how to confirm that an ICE officer's warrant is valid and memorized the emergency number to report violations — 200-1548, she rattles off as proof. Then she made the rounds, sharing that news with her fellow businesses. Not all of them are Latino, but Saudi, Pakistani and Chinese, too. "It's good if they know what to do or what not to do," she says.
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Not long after Elias' regular phone calls to the city began, Mayor Ed Lee honored her as a Latino Heritage Business. He visited the shop a few times, often enough to pick a favorite cookie (pineapple and coconut). A photograph of the late mayor is now up on her wall, beside all her workers' food-handling certificates and a small plaque reading "God bless this business."
Last year, then-acting Mayor Mark Farrell followed Lee's path to La Mejor, stopping by to reassure her and other Mission businesses of San Francisco's commitment to its sanctuary city status. Elias likes Mayor London Breed's emphasis on cleaning up the sidewalks. She wouldn't say no to a visit from mayor number three.
A more immediate reassurance arrived two weeks ago, not long after her birthday, when her neighbors delivered her favorite cake from Dianda's Pastries on three days in a row. She asked her landlord on the phone if he would extend her lease when it expired again next year. Carmen, don't worry, he told her. "I'm going to give it to you for five years."
Six more years! The news means she can relax, says the woman who works seven days a week. She can even joke about retiring for good, now that she knows she won't have to.
Three things to know about La Mejor
The details: 3329 24th St. (at Mission Street), San Francisco; 415-655-3622. 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
What to get: Custard turnovers, pineapple-coconut cookies and Salvadoran quesadilla (particularly popular with the computer people, in part because the rich cheese bread is made with rice flour).
Just FYI: Most of the pastries are baked fresh each morning and thrown out at night, but the week's cookies are baked on Tuesday evenings.
Jonathan Kauffman
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Jonathan Kauffman has been writing about food for The Chronicle since the spring of 2014. He focuses on the intersection of food and culture — whether that be profiling chefs, tracking new trends in nonwestern cuisines, or examining the impact of technology on the way we eat.
After cooking for a number of years in Minnesota and San Francisco, Kauffman left the kitchen to become a journalist. He reviewed restaurants for 11 years in the Bay Area and Seattle (East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly) before abandoning criticism in order to tell the stories behind the food. His first book, "Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat," was published in 2018.
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