La Cocina on Hyde - A Commercial Kitchen
La Cocina's food hall at 101 Hyde Street shut its kiosks to the public on 1 September 2023. The building reopened in May 2024 as a shared production kitchen for the nonprofit's food businesses. You cannot eat here, and the lease runs to December 2026.
Why go
La Cocina has spent twenty years renting affordable kitchen space to working-class food entrepreneurs. Most of them are women, immigrants and people of color. The classes cover product, finance, marketing and operations. The Municipal Marketplace was the one attempt at giving those businesses a public counter. It opened in April 2021 in a disused post office building, with six original vendors. Kiosk rent started at $500 a month. The hall sold more than 5,000 meals at $5 to people who needed them.
Leticia Landa, the executive director, told KQED the hall was spending around $209,000 a month and taking about $24,000. The biggest saving in closing it was staff: three security guards, a bartender and service staff on every shift. The food hall's build left something the organisation could use. Its 7,000-square-foot room holds a set of almost separate kitchens. Thirteen businesses were permitted to work there when it reopened. Reem Assil's Reem's is one of the alumni and now has a Ferry Building space of its own.
What locals & experts say
- Leticia Landa, executive director of La Cocina, to KQED in May 2024:
Places like the Marketplace can't live on admiration alone.
They expected foot traffic to turn a corner after COVID and it never did.1 - Tiffany Carter of Boug Cali, one of the six original vendors, to the San Francisco Chronicle in August 2023:
I'm still processing that it's happening. It's surreal, and it doesn't feel good.
She felt sadder for the community than for herself.2
Good to know
- Status: a working kitchen, not a place to eat. The public marketplace is gone.
- How to buy from it: catering, through La Cocina's own site.
- Where: 101 Hyde Street, at Golden Gate Avenue.
Verdict
listed — Do not put it on a day's plan; eat where the graduates landed instead.