In an interview with the Bay Area News Group, the business owner said that she “didn’t know” that she was doing work that was considered to be practicing law in the judgment of state regulators.

The agency raided the company, California Legal Services, last week after numerous complaints about its owner, Robin Groth-Hill, the agency announced Wednesday. In the process, regulators seized 15 boxes from the business, which contained the files of a couple hundred clients.

The business touted itself as an affordable legal option for landlords, tenants and people seeking divorce help.

The seizures marked the most significant move to date against Groth-Hill, who previously received cease-and-desist orders in 2020 and 2022 for the unauthorized practice of law, according to a state database.

Reached by this news organization, Groth-Hill said she had no idea she might be practicing law, and she questioned why the California State Bar had gone to such lengths to pursue her and her business.

“This is a big nothing — I don’t know why I’m even involved in any of this,” said Groth-Hill, later adding that “there’s just so many things wrong with this, it doesn’t make sense.”

In announcing the seizure, state regulators encouraged residents to check the state’s online database to ensure their attorneys were licensed to practice law, and not facing any similar cease and desist orders. The database can be accessed at calbar.ca.gov.

“Californians should know that the unauthorized practice of law — and those who engage in it — can negatively impact the lives of those who pay for what they believe is legitimate attorney advice but receive something less, as well as parties on all sides of a legal issue,” said Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona, in a statement.

The company appears to have been operating since 2015, according to a LinkedIn page for Groth-Hill, who also goes by the shortened name of Robin Hill. A Yelp biography touts the company as “a affordable alternative to your legal assistance needs,” adding that its staff “can assist you in doing many of the services that attorney’s provide, but at a substantial savings!”

The Yelp biography listed the owner only as Robin H., a registered process server and notary whose husband occasionally helped her during his days off.

“I am not an attorney, but a legal assistant who can help Pro Per clients in affordably filing their legal papers in court,” the Yelp business profile said. “I do civil work, family law, probate, small claims and lots of real estate recording work. Evictions is my speciality (sic) and I know the court systems in Northern California and work with many property managers to assist with their problem tenants.”

In seizing the business, the state bar cited multiple complaints about Groth-Hill’s alleged dealings over the last 18 months. One complaint from July 2023 stemmed from a landlord-tenant and small claims case in Santa Clara County Superior Court. The plaintiff in that case told court officials that Groth-Hill was “his attorney,” according to the state bar’s announcement Wednesday.

A court commissioner also discovered that Groth-Hill “caused a subpoena to be served on the defendant’s bank, but provided no proof that the defendant was served with notice as required,” the agency’s announcement said. Groth-Hill also tried to negotiate a settlement in that case, the agency claimed.

Just months earlier, in January 2023, state regulators received another complaint from a tenant who was embroiled in a dispute with her landlord. In that case, Groth-Hill told the tenant that she was helping the landlord as a “legal assistant” or a “legal aid” and pushed the tenant to take a cash-for-keys offer, according to state officials.

Groth-Hill maintained that she was only ever “trying to be a middle man resolving a situation,” and that she never intended to act an as attorney or to run afoul of any state regulations. She said she was fully cooperative with the state officials who seized her files, and asked: “wouldn’t a phone call have been better?”

“I have nothing to hide — I didn’t do anything purposefully wrong,” Groth-Hill said. “I didn’t know that was practicing law in the eyes of the state bar. So again, if I did something, I apologize.”

Any current or former clients of Groth-Hill or her company can ask for their files back by calling the state bar at 415-538-2380.

Oakland Fire Department spokesman Michael Hunt said investigators probing the fire found evidence indicating the blaze was deliberately set. He declined to release details about the evidence that pointed to arson.

Hunt said the department has not identified any suspects and that investigators were still looking for anyone who may have information about the fire.

The announcement marked the latest twist in a nearly six-month saga that began on Nov. 21, 2023, when a fire gutted the restaurant at 2534 Mandela Parkway.

Almost immediately, the West Oakland eatery’s owner, Matt Horn, suggested that someone had purposefully set it ablaze.

The fire charred the back and interior of the restaurant so badly that city inspectors immediately red-tagged the building, declaring it off-limits until structural concerns were addressed. At the time, Horn speculated to news outlets that the blaze may have been retribution for a social media post he’d made two days earlier, when the side of his restaurant had been tagged with graffiti.

“To you cowardly individuals responsible for this, hear me clearly: You are nothing more than the filth that plagues our beautiful city,” Horn had written on Instagram following the tagging.

The restaurant re-opened late last month at 864 8th St. in downtown Oakland, which already was the site of another of Horn’s restaurants, a happy-hour burger spot called Matty’s Old Fashioned.

During the intervening months, Horn faced multiple legal battles that left him facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements, often over claims that he stiffed a former business partner or that he failed to pay his invoices. All the while, the popular eatery received a groundswell of financial support from the community in the form of $130,000 in GoFundMe donations and $100,000 in federal COVID-19 relief funding.

In December, a judge ordered Horn to pay a $167,000 settlement to a former business partner, David Kim, who claimed that he had to work for free after helping get Horn Barbecue off the ground. Kim claimed he was then pushed out of the business.

The same day as the settlement order, Horn asked the Alameda County Board of Supervisors for $100,000 in federal COVID-19 relief funding. The request added to $488,820 in other forms of COVID-19 relief money that Horn received in recent years, including loans, grants and tax credits.

The supervisors later unanimously approved the request at a meeting in late February as part of a bulk vote that contained numerous other agenda items, including another $100,000 for a co-working and events space company named Oakstop. At least one supervisor, Nate Miley, later said he wasn’t familiar with the Horn Barbecue agenda item.

The money for Horn came from a $3.1 million pot of COVID-19 money that Supervisor Keith Carson had been given to benefit his district, which includes West Oakland and parts of North Oakland. Other supervisors received similar shares of money to help other parts of the county.

All the while, Kim’s attorneys complained that Horn appeared to be slow-walking payments from their December settlement.

Kim issued Horn a written notice in mid-February accusing him of avoiding his agreed-upon duty to either make his next payment or explain with financial documents why he could not. The pitmaster had been “particularly nefarious” in appearing to shirk issuing those payments, Kim’s attorney alleged, though the two sides ultimately reached a new payment agreement in late April.

In March, Horn also was ordered to pay $64,000 to Cooks Company Produce, a San Francisco-based distributor that sued Horn over a contract dispute. There was also an $83,000 settlement Horn owed to his former meat distributor, Golden Gate Meat Co., amid allegations of unpaid invoices.

In a reply Thursday to a comment that mentioned the arson finding on an Instagram post not related to the fire, Horn wrote: “Unfortunate to have happened. We will keep building.”

In a written statement provided Friday, Horn said, “We have full confidence in the Oakland Fire Department’s handling of the investigation into the fire at our former Horn Barbecue location on Mandela Parkway. As we focus on our newly opened location in Old Oakland, we remain committed to serving and uplifting the community. We have moved forward and will continue to keep our city in our prayers. No further comments will be made regarding this matter.”

Fire investigators ask anyone with information about the fire to contact them at 510-238-4031.

Reporter Kate Bradshaw contributed to this story.

Calling their work “disjointed” and a “missed opportunity,” the auditor spread blame throughout the city’s government for the blown deadline that kept the city from receiving a share of the $267 million offered by the state. As a result, the auditor recommended the city adopt a policy that would help leaders in different city departments better coordinate their efforts to receive grants in the future.

“To assign blame for missing the application deadline on an administrative or technical failure overlooks deeper organizational problems with this particular grant application process,” read Acting City Auditor Michael C. Houston’s report, which was dated Tuesday.

The report comes in the wake of a blown July 2023 deadline to submit an application to the Board of State and Community Corrections, which sought to hand out millions of dollars to 34 police departments, seven sheriff’s offices and 13 district attorney’s offices for theft prevention. The money was meant to help police and prosecutors target a slew of crimes, including catalytic car thefts. It also would help go after burglary teams targeting retail outlets, and car thieves cruising neighborhoods to steal vehicles — both prominent problems in Oakland and many other Bay Area communities.

Last year, as other cities crowed about the funds they received — and Oakland’s failure became apparent — city officials called the lapse “unacceptable” and vowed to make changes to prevent it from happening again.

This week, however, the auditor pilloried the city for its dearth of organizational leadership, its lack of project management and the absence of any grant management policy to address the failure.

Even though the city knew for 73 days of the grant’s existence, its staff members weren’t fully engaged in applying for it until 16 days before it was due, according to the report. The auditor consistently blamed “a lack of communication and coordination” among city staff for that late notice, as well as for ultimately failing to submit the application within that roughly two-week span.

While some police lieutenants worked on an application, a member of the city’s Economic and Workforce Development Department reached out separately to a member of the city’s business community — without first contacting the police — to discuss the idea of applying for the grant. Not until two weeks later did the economic and workforce development employee alert the police department to find out if they were aware of the grant.

As recently as 11 days before the grant proposal was due, city and police department staff members were emailing back and forth about new proposals. And less than an hour before the 5 p.m. deadline on July 7 to submit the application, different staff members were still trying to submit documents for the application — several of which were not uploaded successfully, the report said.

Ultimately, the auditor laid blame on the city’s leaders for the breakdown.

The mayor, for example, “could have directed or communicated to the City Administrator the importance of applying” for the grant, as well as whether to involve other departments. That’s particularly true, because such projects “need direction from the highest level” of the city’s leadership, the auditor concluded.

Yet Oakland Police Department leaders also could have done more to ensure the grant was successfully submitted, the report said, especially since Oakland interim’s police chief, Darren Allison, appeared to take responsibility for pursuing the grant shortly after the city learned of its existence.

Complicating the entire process was the fact that several city agencies connected to the grant application were being overseen by interim leaders at the time the city had learned of the grant, including the city’s administrator, its police chief and the director of its Economic and Workforce Development Department.

Critically, there was no project manager appointed to help shepherd the project along, the auditor’s report found, leading to “multiple parties trying to upload different sections of the application, and the ultimate failure to submit the application.”

In a statement, City Administrator Jestin Johnson said the city has “fast-tracked corrective action” after the blown deadline by identifying “several areas” where their system broke down. Those changes include starting monthly grant coordination meetings, and creating a new position to coordinate grant applications, a person who is expected to “come on board later this month.

“We are pleased that the audit’s analysis validates what we observed and the initial corrective action we have taken,” Johnson’s statement said. “We are grateful for our partners and we are working hard to deliver improved governance and the clean, safe city that all Oaklanders deserve.”

Houston, the auditor, acknowledged the city has since worked to hire a grants coordinator who is dedicated to public safety grants, while also obtaining grant management software.

However, Houston wrote that the city also needed to adopt a policy that could “help form stronger organizational leadership, dedicated project management and improved coordination and communication for grants.”

A message left by this newspaper with the Oakland Police Department was not returned.

In a statement, Francis Zamora, a spokesperson for Thao, said the mayor has taken several steps since the blown grant application deadline, including implementing a public safety strategy and putting in place an “improved” process for managing grants. Both those efforts have started to show results, Zamora added.

“Mayor Thao took responsibility for this missed opportunity in her State of the City address last October, stating ‘The buck stops with me,’ ” the statement said.

Steve H.S. Kim pleaded guilty to wire fraud and trafficking in counterfeit goods after federal prosecutors said he sold $3.5 million in counterfeit fan assemblies to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency, federal authorities announced Thursday. He faces up to 20 years in prison on one count and 10 years in prison on the other.

Kim, 63, had claimed the fan assembles he sold to the Department of Defense were new, when they were actually used or surplus items, according to the DOJ. He tried tricking the government by using counterfeit labels and fake tracing documents that were signed under a false identity, the justice department said.

Some of the fans were either installed on — or bound for use with — electrical components of a nuclear submarine, an aircraft’s laser system and a surface-to-air missile system, the department said.

Federal officials decried the scheme on Thursday, while vowing to root out fraud that could hamper U.S. military troops serving abroad. One homeland security official called risks to troops affected by Kim’s alleged scheme “especially alarming.”

“Swindling our military is a sure way to find oneself in jail,” U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey for the Northern District of California said in a statement. “This office is always on the lookout for fraudsters and will prosecute anyone caught cheating our military by providing products that endanger our service people or compromise our readiness.”

Yolanda Cheers, who is also known as Yolanda Brown, pleaded no contest to felony grand theft by embezzlement in late January, in a deal that saw the dismissal of about a dozen other forgery, identity theft and other embezzlement charges, court records show.

Prosecutors claimed Cheers funneled two, $4,000 transfers to herself from the National Equity Project, whose finances she helped oversee. A few years later, prosecutors say Cheers tried to get an unauthorized loan in the name of BMWL & Partners — a business that later discovered several unauthorized pay bonuses and credit card charges in Cheers’ name, according to the DA’s announcement.

Cheers paid for the settlement with two cashiers checks presented on the day of her plea, the DA’s announcement said.

Officers booked the men, ages 41 and 37, into the Santa Clara County jail on Feb. 6, according to the San Jose Police Department.

Investigators suspect the men robbed the bakeries’ employees at gunpoint in December and January — taking cash or the business’ cash register each time. Combined, the businesses’ losses totaled thousands of dollars, the department’s announcement said.

San Jose police did not say which bakeries were robbed, or how many were held up.

Anyone with information about the robberies can contact the San Jose Police Robbery Unit at 408-277-4166 or at 4392@sanjoseca.gov. Tips also can be submitted to Silicon Valley Crime Stoppers via the P3TIPS mobile app, by calling 408-947-7867.

The majority of the 11,186 customers without power were concentrated in the North Bay, where 6,597 customers remained in the dark as of 3 p.m., the utility provider reported. Another 1,799 customers had no power in the South Bay, while 1,149 Peninsula customers remained without power. The East Bay had 1,482 customers lacking service while San Francisco had less than 200 as of mid-Thursday.

The lingering outages came after the strongest storm of the winter season roared ashore over the weekend — felling trees across the state and causing power outages that impacted more than 1 million PG&E customers across the company’s system. Hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents were affected.

On Thursday, those impacts continued. At least three schools in Sonoma County — Horicon, Kashia and West Side Union elementary schools — were closed Thursday due to either power outages or downed power lines near the buildings, according to the Sonoma County Office of Education.

However, in other areas of the region, children returned to class after power outages forced several schools to close. Among the schools back in session were Baldwin Elementary School and Oak Grove High School.

The plodding pace of repairs caused frustration among many Bay Area customers in recent days, with residents questioning the utility provider’s preparedness and diligence in responding to the storm. They reported spoiled food and fast-rising expenses dealing with the prolonged outages, which affected nearly 38,000 homes and businesses as recently as Wednesday afternoon.

The for-profit utility had already been under heavy criticism for a large rate increase that took effect at the beginning of the year — with another jump in customers’ bills on the way this spring.

Jeff Smith, a PG&E spokesman, said Wednesday the storm damaged 2,075 conductors and forced the replacement of 728 poles across the utility provider’s system. Another 357 cross arms needed to be replaced, as did 247 transformers.

He apologized to customers and framed the wind and rain as “the largest single storm producing multiple customer outages in nearly 30 years.” As a result, 5,000 total employees — including 533 crews — were working to address the lingering blackouts.

The work in restoring power comes as the Bay Area enters a period of sunny, drier weather over at least the next several days. High temperatures are expected to linger in the high 50s for much of the region on Thursday and Friday, before rising into the low 60s by the weekend, according to the National Weather Service.

Forecasters did issue advisories noting the possibility of frost in the inner East Bay and much of the South Bay with the low temperatures overnight Thursday into Friday, as well as minor coastal flooding that could be brought on by high tides.

Newsom promised that the swell of CHP officers — who began their deployment Tuesday — will work with local agencies to tackle a broad range of criminal activity, including vehicle theft, retail theft, cargo theft and violent crime. The boost will include “specialized units” as well as “advanced investigative technology,” though the governor’s statement offered few details as to what those measures might entail.

The influx represents a nine-fold increase in the number of CHP personnel in Oakland and Alameda County and comes amid stubbornly high crime rates in Oakland and a wave of business closings often attributed to robberies and car-break-ins. Unlike other major cities, Oakland’s precipitous rise in crime since 2020 still has yet to recede to pre-pandemic levels.

It also arrives in a region long suspicious of law enforcement after a host of policing scandals and violent encounters — among them the June 2020 killing of Erik Salgado by CHP officers.

Community violence prevention nonprofits and police accountability groups voiced distrust of a plan to thrust so many new officers into a region in so little time. Ricardo Garcia-Acosta, director of Community Peace at the violence prevention nonprofit CURYJ, questioned why he had only heard of the surge from media reports — saying “we as a community-based provider are in the dark.”

“It’s not that the Oakland Police Department is understaffed — it’s that the way they utilize the staff they do have is inefficient,” said Cat Brooks, executive director of the Anti Police-Terror Project. She voiced concerns that the influx of officers could lead to an increase in police violence: “Part of my frustration is we keep investing in the same failed strategy.”

But Mayor Sheng Thao lauded the move, as did the Oakland Police Officers’ Association. The Oakland Metro Chamber of Commerce said it was “grateful” for the decision, while Oakland Councilmember Noel Gallo, a frequent critic of the city’s crime woes, hailed the surge as “long overdue.”

“We’ve had an emergency for a long time and for me — whether it’s the highway patrol, the national guard — we need assistance with public safety,” Gallo said.

Other reactions were mixed: The Oakland NAACP praised Newsom for shuffling officers to the city while blasting Thao and city leaders for not doing more to stem the tide of violence in the first place. The statement noted the city’s failure to apply for a state retail theft grant before a key deadline, as well as a year-long absence of a permanent police chief after the firing of former Chief LeRonne Armstrong.

Few specifics were detailed in Newsom’s announcement Tuesday. The 120 officers will operate throughout the East Bay — not only freeways and roads once designated as state highways, such as International Boulevard and San Pablo Avenue, but also on city streets, authorities said. They plan to use license plate readers to spot stolen vehicles. And the plan includes the deployment of “specialized” units, including officers with K9s and “air support,” the statement said.

In ordering the surge, Newsom pointed to persistently high crime rates in the East Bay, particularly Oakland. Homicides have remained stubbornly high in Oakland — topping 100 for four straight years — while robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts all jumped in 2023.

Newsom has ordered CHP officers to Oakland at least twice in recent years, once in September 2021 and again in August 2023, with the aim of combatting everything from sideshows to reckless driving to stolen cars and highway shootings.

The most recent intervention in August led to the arrest of 100 people and the recovery of 193 stolen vehicles across Oakland, according to the governor’s announcement. A similar boost in staffing across the bay in San Francisco led to 460 arrests and thousands of citations, along with the seizure of 18.1 kilograms of fentanyl, the statement said.

Yet the sheer volume of incoming officers is unlike anything in recent memory. The August 2023 surge, for example, included fewer than a dozen officers and a supervisor, said Huy Nguyen, president of Oakland Police Officers’ Association.

“What’s happening in this beautiful city and surrounding area is alarming and unacceptable,” Newsom’s statement said. “I’m sending the California Highway Patrol to assist local efforts to restore a sense of safety that the hardworking people of Oakland and the East Bay demand and deserve.”

For Oakland business owners — some of whom have garnered national headlines for closing while publicly blaming the city’s crime problem — Newsom’s plan stirred a range of feelings. Few said they were satisfied with how law enforcement has handled the issue to date.

“Every single time we need to call the police, we get put on hold, so I usually don’t even call them,” said Jade Herrera, a manager at Café of the Bay in the Laurel neighborhood. “We can just hire a lot of private security to deal with it. The few times police have shown up, they take a statement. Nothing ever comes of it.”

But installing security cameras and hiring extra muscle haven’t quite worked either, Herrera added, noting that burglaries, car break-ins and daytime thefts are part of everyday life.

The family-run Los Costeñitas on High Street opened just a few years ago and hasn’t seen such problems, but worker Oscar Barrea said his “auntie gets scared” when closing up at night.

More officers, he said, “wouldn’t bother us — she’s in here with just her son.”

Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at jrodgers@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Authorities took the men into custody after they allegedly used vehicles to drag the ATMs out of a bank and a credit union before dawn Sunday on Hegenberger Road. The machines ended up at a homeless encampment roughly three miles away.

The first ATM was seen being pulled by a vehicle at about 6:40 a.m. from Providence Credit Union, 8801 Edgewater Drive off Hegenberger, according to Oakland police. The second was seen being dragged a short time later from a Bank of America building less than a mile away, at 333 Hegenberger.

Both banks are located in a commercial area between the Oakland International Airport and Interstate 880 that’s been plagued by businesses leaving due to crime. Most recently, In-N-Out cited car break-ins and armed robberies as reasons the company plans to close its only Oakland location in March.

Authorities said the ATMs were tracked to a homeless encampment the 4000 block of Alameda Avenue near High Street.

But Doran won’t be able to keep his generous plan going, because he can no longer afford to operate his cafe, even with the good will and support of many loyal customers and after the cafe received national coverage this year from NBC’s Today and the Washington Post.

Over the holiday weekend, Doran announced that the cafe would serve its last meal Monday. So on New Year’s Day, Doran fired up the grill one last time as scores of people lined up down the block — each seeking a final meal of blueberry-packed pancakes, seasoned eggs and sizzling bacon from the decades-long fixture at the corner of Sacramento Street and Dwight Way.

“On the one hand, it’s incredibly rewarding” to see so many people lined out the door, said Doran, while standing inside his bustling kitchen. “It’s just also very sad. It’s a lot of mixed emotions.”

On Monday, Doran dismissed any notion that his “Everybody Eats” free meals program contributed to the restaurant’s demise. He stressed that donations from the community helped offset the costs of providing those free meals, which totaled about 5,000 in 2023. If anything, business increased after he started the program.

He also downplayed any talk that the booming response to his closure announcement would lead to a change of heart, emphasizing that the cafe would still close despite the long lines that awaited him on New Year’s Day.

The decision boiled down to the difficulty of operating “a small, locally owned, full-service restaurant that serves homemade food out of quality ingredients, at relatively reasonable and affordable prices, while valuing its employees and refusing to pay less than a living wage, is apparently not possible,” Doran wrote in a Facebook post announcing the closure.

For his regulars and neighbors, the abrupt closure came as a depressing surprise.

“It’s devastating — it’s like losing a family member,” said Juliet Lee, 60, who lived three blocks away and had her first plate here when her 16-year-old son was still in a booster seat. Every Mother’s Day and birthday since then started with a cup of coffee and a meal here. “Look at all the love,” she added, gesturing to the masses gathered at the door.

The Homemade Cafe originally opened in 1979, and Doran often ate at it while he growing up in Berkeley. After working different jobs at various Bay Area restaurants, including at Homemade, he purchased the cafe in 2011 and continued its simple “mission of serving great food.”

After becoming owner, Doran began to pay attention to the homeless people standing outside his restaurant, asking customers for money and food. It never occurred to him to try to make them leave. Instead, he said it hurt him to see people go hungry, so he came up with a plan to feed them. “For me, it’s a basic human right: People should have food, shelter and medical care. In our society, no one should go hungry.”

Doran said he began informally offering free breakfasts to anyone who was going through tough times, whether they were unhoused or they were out of work and having trouble paying the bills. Meanwhile, his cafe enjoyed its share of boom times over the years.

But more recently, it’s been beset by many of the challenges and rising costs that come with trying to run a restaurant in a notoriously tough industry and in the pricey Bay Area. Then came the upheaval of COVID-19, which left Homemade Cafe reeling, as Doran explained.

“We tried to evolve, pivot, change with the times all the while staying true to our goal of being a positive part of this community,” Doran said on Facebook.

Even as Homemade Cafe struggled, Doran remain committed to feeding hungry people — particularly as the number of people needing food assistance grew with the pandemic. That’s because helping others was integral to the restaurant’s mission, he said.

Doran formalized his “Everybody Eats” program in early 2023. He told the Post he was inspired by the free breakfast program the Black Panthers instituted in 1969. Here’s how it worked: Customers could donate $5, which would go toward “free food” cards available inside the restaurant and given out in the community. A hungry person could walk in with the card and use it to receive a meal of two eggs any way, plus potatoes, toast and coffee. Homemade also offered free dinners to people the night before Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, Doran invested more than $200,000 of his own savings to keep the cafe open. He also launched a GoFundMe page that asked customers to chip in for operational costs, so that he could continue to pay employees a living wage after they “unanimously and unambiguously” volunteered to take 20% pay cuts.

Both the GoFundMe campaign, which raised more than $56,000, and the national coverage about the “Everybody Eats” program helped the Homemade Cafe garner positive publicity, which made Doran think its fortunes could be changing. But then reality began to set in. “It helped, but not enough,” he said.

Clutching a cup of coffee and awaiting a syrupy plate of waffles with a side of bacon, Odell Stanifer called each meal here a “blessing.” Living in an RV parked a few blocks away, he filled up a couple times a week on pancakes, scrambled eggs and grits. It played a critical role in stretching his home cupboard a little longer to get through the week.

“I don’t think I’ll ever find a place like this,” said Stanifer, 54. “They say a good thing never lasts. And I just didn’t see it coming.”

Digging into a plate of syrupy pancakes with a side of bacon, Stanifer flashed a smile and relished one last meal here. And he held out hope that Doran’s program would continue elsewhere, at some other Berkeley eatery with more delicious, filling food.

“Every time I came here, the plate of food they gave us was a very uplifting plate,” Stanifer said. “I’m going to miss getting it.”