Lea Sabado and Andre Higginbotham opened Excelsior Coffee, a sliver of a cafe on Mission Street in the heart of the Excelsior district, one year ago.
For pandemic reasons and more, it hasn’t been what they expected. But one thing they can count on is support on two and four wheels. The couple are gearheads: Motorcycles and classic cars (and espresso machines) are their jam.
For their one-year anniversary yesterday, they put out a call for a motor rally. Dozens of people, some local, some roaring in from other Bay Area towns, showed up.
Kiana and Bradley Cruz rode across the bay from Richmond to celebrate. Kiana knows Excelsior through bike and coffee circles; she has a roasting business, and like Excelsior’s owners, prefers a richer, more classic flavor than some of the lighter coffees so popular these days. “I’m not afraid of the dark roast,” Cruz says.
The rally started in front of the cafe and wound through the southeastern city. It was a kick for all kinds of moto-fanatics behind the wheels of moddish Italian scooters, growling Harley Davidsons, muscled-up Mustangs, slammed-out lowriders, and much more.
As Sabado points out, this stretch of Mission Street, south of Highway 280, “is nothing like the Mission.” It’s one of the city’s commercial corridors that, putting pandemic life aside, still feels like the San Francisco of 20, 30, even 40 years ago. Sabado and Higginbotham, who live nearby, are trying to update the neighborhood’s coffee profile without disrupting too much.
They can’t avoid being hip (the cafe space is too cool, with a custom neon sign and black-and-white photos of cars and bikes hung just so), but Sabado says they try to bridge various gaps, between generations, professions, and cultures. “It helps that we’re people of color; we cover a lot of the culture that represents the Excelsior, black and Mexican and Filipina,” she says.
Sabado, 34, grew up in Los Angeles but much of her extended family lived in San Francisco. “I knew I wanted to be here from a young age,” she says. She trained as an accountant and hasn’t given up her practice.
Her husband Higginbotham, 36, grew up in Santa Cruz. He teaches social studies at George Washington High School as well as a motorcycle mechanics class at the nearby June Jordan School for Equity.
Now with a 2-year-old son, the couple met as San Francisco State University undergrads 14 years ago. “We’re best friends and parents and partners in all aspects of our relationship,” Sabado says.
The Frisc talked to Sabado about Excelsior Coffee’s roller-coaster ride as she prepared for the anniversary.
The conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Frisc: Let’s start with your pandemic story. What’s life been like since shelter-in-place was declared on March 16?
Lea Sabado: Right after, the staff took a vote and decided to close down because it was too sensitive, very scary. I paid them out for days already scheduled. Then two weeks passed, and my husband and I were like, “We have all this coffee and milk that’s going to go bad. Let’s open up one day and get through the stock.”
I can’t tell you how much neighborhood support flooded the shop. I think from that point we decided it was more positive to be open. The corridor was already lacking so many essential needs, whether it was five minutes of conversation or picking up beans. We thought we could do it with limited hours, and do it safely.
It’s been hard to maintain. Day care has been closed, and Andre has been home to teach and still be a dad. It’s hard to focus.
I’m at the shop at 7:30 am, I’m home by 3 or 3:30 pm, then time with my son, then dinner time. The only time I can focus on my [tax] practice is 8 pm to 1 am. It’s been like that for about two and a half months. It’s a bit better now that my staff has come back.
We’re now going to stay open until 4 pm. Two staffers aren’t coming back, so I have to hire two more to get back to four.
Did you get any financial assistance?
We ended up getting a PPP loan. I’m close to our legislative aide in District 11. They said to get our paperwork in order. I was on top of it. Paperwork is what I can do all day, every day.
I submitted the day it came out, and it was like, sorry, the money ran out.
With me being on the other side [as an accountant] helping clients get their PPP loans, I was like, “What’s the difference between my business and your business?” It came down to banking relationships. One client had a very prominent high-net-worth-individual bank. And we were banking with a credit union. It all came down to who you know. It was upsetting.
But when the second one came out we reapplied and finally got it — $12,000. We’re OK, but it’s a Band-Aid.
Did you have reserves?
No, we’ve been bootstrapping the whole time. I’ve had some money from my tax practice, but since the pandemic, it’s been just myself and my husband.
We’ve had to pay rent during this time. Our landlord has voiced to us that they rely on their rental income. If we were to defer, we would still owe the back pay in the future, which we don’t feel comfortable with, and we won’t know if we’d have capital or savings to do that.
You’ve been in the Excelsior nearly a decade. It hasn’t changed as fast as other neighborhoods. Did you think about gentrification when you opened?
We’ve tried to be sensitive. We got labeled “hip” because we’re younger. It helps that we’re parents, because it’s heavily family-oriented. It helps that Andre is in the school district and rallied teacher solidarity behind us. And it helps that we’re people of color; we cover a lot of the culture that represents the Excelsior, black and Mexican and Filipina.
We can bridge those gaps, transitioning from millennials but still sensitive to the elderly and seniors. In fact, when doing our business plan, our goal was to acquaint and entice the established coffee drinkers in the neighborhood who were used to drinking diner coffee. We wanted them to taste something new, but not otherworldly. Just something comparable.
We have a roaster roast a specific blend for us, more medium to dark, with hints of chocolate, cane sugar, caramel, and toffee, a sit-by-the-fire-and-eat-some-smores type of feeling.
With coffee you can go really light and fruity, which brings out more acidity, but we didn’t want that profile for our shop.
How did you get into coffee?
I was an intern at an accounting firm. I was living in the Mission near the original Four Barrel Cafe back in 2008, they had just gotten started. With me frequently studying there, the owner engaged me and said, “What do you do for work?” I told him, and he said ‘Oh my God, I might need some help.’
They became a client of the firm, and I was doing the mundane bookkeeping and got exposed to all facets of beginning a business, wholesale accounts, retail. It opened my eyes to all types of things that go with coffee: science, creative latte art, production, and the technical side, the plumbing, the electrical, the ins and outs. It’s a cup of coffee but it means more than that to us.
We’ve only been open a year, but it feels like five.
What made you and your husband take the leap and start your own business?
We moved to the Excelsior nine years ago. It’s Mission Street, but it’s nothing like the Mission. It was the only affordable place in SF to raise a family.
We either left the neighborhood to get coffee or we made espresso at home. We had a hand-me-down plastic Oscar Simonelli espresso machine from our friends at Four Barrel. The idea sprouted: Shit, if we want speciality coffee, we imagine other neighbors in the Excelsior want it too. After three or four years, I was working for Chrome Industries, but they moved to Portland, and I wasn’t going to move with them. That was the sign: You need to do this. The blessing in disguise.
We got serious in 2017. We had to commit by either signing something or selling something. We had a 1964 Ford Falcon and sold it because we came upon a good deal on a La Marzocco espresso machine. Normally it’s about $13,000 new, but we got it for about half. It’s all talk until you have something tangible, and that kicked our asses into doing it.
Were you prepared for the specific aspects of small business unique to San Francisco?
There’s a funny story behind that.
We signed the lease, say, January 2018, and we wanted at least six months of rent abatement to have time to build out. We couldn’t pull our permits, though, because it turned out it had previously been an underground gambling den and busted by the ABC and SFPD. The landlord didn’t divulge it; we only found out because we couldn’t pull permits. There was a red flag on it.
We had to start from scratch, including neighborhood notification of “Do you want a coffee shop here?” The neighborhood has to vote you in — it’s a minimum three-month process. We waited, and no one responded. So it was build-out time.
We didn’t have capital to hire someone full-time to be the project manager. I thought I could handle it, but it’s a monumental task. I can’t tell you how many times I’d go down to the Department of Building Inspection, and it was a learning experience. You have to know what you’re asking for.
That was part of our delay. Learning experience, rookie mistakes, me taking it on. And in the middle of it my son was born, in May 2018. Just life! I can laugh and banter about it now, but it was big hardships and hurdles, and probably one of the biggest tests of resilience between my husband and I.
We thought we’d open within 2018.
What are the next steps for the business?
In my mind, we’re in a good position; when we negotiated the lease the landlord wanted Mission prices. We said we’re not quite there yet. It was for an eight-year lease with no rent increase the first two years.
The lease negotiation was crucial. We saw a lot of potential in the Excelsior. I’m part of the Excelsior-Outer Mission planning group, I knew what the plans were for more housing in this area. It’s going to change, it’s inevitable, but if we can maintain the culture and authenticity of the Excelsior through us, it’s a win.
We have a new lens on the business, being black-owned, that helps out a little bit. But it’s up in the air. No one is out on the corridor. It doesn’t help that there are not many options for groceries or dining out. It’s very skeletal. We’re not going to survive unless the new housing units are up.
Lately I’ve started ordering more single-origin coffee — one farmer, one kind of coffee — because we’re becoming more an essential stop for coffee instead of the grocery store.
Our next transition is to turn the front of the shop into more of a takeout model. A place to get a hangover burrito is on the corridor, but not a hangover breakfast sandwich. Coffee and pastries, grab-and-go sandwiches, then dry goods and pantry items, like olive oils, concentrates for tea, breads, and we’re in the middle of getting our beer and wine license. That license is crucial.
Doing all that sounds almost run-of-the-mill after what you’ve gone through.
And right before COVID we had a plumbing line leak through our walls and got flooded, just a mess!
But yeah, we dove in. That’s the best way to learn, really. We’re allowed those growing pains. You can’t really project anything or have high expectations, just an expectation of quality for ourselves, then other intangibles either fall in line or not. That summarizes our whole reflection of the year. I don’t want to say that we’re not rigid, but we’re more the personality types that take it in stride and take it as you go.
We’ve only been open a year, but it feels like five.