Early last year, Collin Doran came up with a radically simple plan to feed the homeless people he’d seen struggling outside Homemade Cafe, his popular Berkeley restaurant that’s operated in the neighborhood for 45 years. He began to serve them free breakfasts of two eggs with the works — no questions asked.
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.”
