Restaurateurs Serve Up Hope in San Francisco’s Notorious Tenderloin District

Chef Azalina Eusope, co-owner of Azalina's restaurant in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco on May 16, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Amid the crime and chaos of San Francisco’s most infamous drug-infested neighborhood, the owners of one restaurant are serving up a message of inspiration and hope.

Chef Azalina Eusope and her business partner Tim Benson, co-owners of Azalina’s restaurant, opened their doors at the Ellis Street location in the infamous Tenderloin district last summer. Undaunted by the bleak conditions on the street, Eusope says she sees hope where others don’t. She embraces what each new day has to offer in the culturally diverse neighborhood.

“As a small business owner, and as an immigrant myself, I want to talk about the positive narrative of this neighborhood,” she said. “It’s challenging, but we’re just trying to show love through our food and bridge the gap one plate at a time.”

Azalina’s offers Malaysian cuisine, a melding of Chinese, Indian, and Polynesian/Malay flavors and ingredients with some European influences that blend food culture and taste to make dishes distinctly different. It has been rated by the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times as one of the top 25 restaurants in the city.

Eusope, once a fifth-generation street vendor in Penang, which she calls the “Hawaii of Malaysia,” left the island in her early teens for better opportunities and lived in seven different countries before coming to the United States at 24.

“I come from a very marginalized community in Malaysia,” she said. “I can identify with a lot of people in Tenderloin coming and looking for that second chance. I’ve been given that.”

When she arrived in America, Eusope struggled to learn English and to survive. She sought comfort from the food she learned to cook in her homeland.

“I have a lot of emotional and personal attachment to my business, for sure, because the food saved me,” she said.

Struggle and Strife

Good-natured and optimistic—but not naïve—Eusope is skeptical of the American Dream.

“I learned rather quickly the American Dream only applies to a very small percentage of people that have networks. For many of us that don’t have a network, it’s not really the American Dream,” she said.

Many immigrants living “in the shadows” of the Tenderloin need those networks to help them “get there,” Eusope said.

“They were hoping that coming to this great nation would give them a second chance for their pursuit of happiness. We should be able to give that,” she said. “I came here 22 years ago … looking for my own pursuit of happiness, and I found it through food.”

Chef Azalina Euspoe, co-owner of Azalina's restaurant in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco on May 16, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

But, happiness is “hard to measure,” she says.

“Some people want to be a millionaire. Some people just want to make sure that they can give their children a great education, so it’s a range of everything. I just want everyone to be able to achieve that pursuit of happiness, whatever it might be. That’s my hope,” she said.

Eusope says she is “blessed” to have the moral support of people around her.

“I’m very grateful for that,” she said. “They are the ones pushing me forward.”

As an immigrant woman in business, Eusope believes she must “step up beyond what other businesses are doing” to set an example and represent “that idea of pursuit of happiness.”

“You’ve got to keep stepping up, especially being in this neighborhood,” she said. “It’s not a burden, but I feel like if I can get to that goal, that will really open up opportunity for a lot of other people that live in the neighborhood and just create that hope.”

As “one little fish” in a big pond, “I’m using food to kind of get that message out,” she said. “I’m just going to continue cooking and hopefully empower more people to do same thing and maybe that will elevate the whole community.”

Overcoming Hardship

About 14 years ago, Eusope sold two dishes at a farmer’s market that caught the attention of Bon Appétit, a national magazine, which featured them as “best brunch,” and the notoriety helped her to get a small bank loan to expand, she said.

“My children grew up sleeping in the car while I was making food at the farmers’ market,” she said. “It was really wild.”

Now, at 45, Eusope’s two children are grown, leaving her more time for her craft. She is listed as one of California’s best chefs by the James Beard Foundation and one of the top five restaurants in the Bay Area Michelin Guide, according to Eater San Francisco, which named her Chef of the Year in 2023.

Azalina’s is now internationally recognized as a top-tier restaurant in the heart of the Tenderloin.

“So, that’s a very big deal,” she said.

A sampling of Malaysian cuisine at Azalina’s in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Courtesy of Azalina’s

Pandemic Problems

Before the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world, Eusope and Benson were running three restaurants in San Francisco and had built a “million-dollar” commercial kitchen in a rented a 20,000 square-foot facility in Bay View.

“We had a great model that we wanted to expand,” but when COVID hit, she said, “there was no cash flow.”

The Bay View kitchen was their headquarters and a hub that served as a “commissary” to supply other restaurants, and included a 5,000 square-foot space where they grew their own vegetables using hydroponics—without soil and with water-based nutrients—indoors for their own venues as well as others in the city, she said.

“We were doing high-volume catering from there, and we were cooking for our other restaurants—the sauces that take a lot longer and one of the dishes that was much more labor intensive, she said.

But when landlords raised the rent at their other restaurant locations in the middle of the pandemic, she said they couldn’t absorb the costs.

“It was too much because we don’t have investors. We’re an independent business,” she said. “We lost all of it, and that’s how we ended up in the Tenderloin.”

Tim Benson, co-owner of Azalina's restuarant in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, Calif., on May 16, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Resilience and Rebuilding

Although the new restaurant is small, with seating for 32, “it is what it is,” Eusope said, and allows her to “continue doing what I love most: cooking.”

“It’s in my DNA,” she said. “I have to cook. This is what I do. I work every single day. Even when we lost everything, I was still working. That’s my only coping mechanism.”

They’ve built relationships with “uber small” local farmers and fishers to supply vegetables and seafood, Eusope said.

“The folks who catch all our seafood are three generations of Cambodian fisherwomen,” she said.

Eusope purchased hand-built tables from two local carpenters and bought plants from two couples from Bangladesh who own a shop in the district.

“Those are the things that we need to hear more of, not this darkness that’s on the street,” she said.

Local businesses are also working to develop a system of crypto currency, called “community currency,” that would allow tokens for Tenderloin residents and business owners to barter, Eusope said.

Chef Azalina Eusope opened her restaurant, Azalina’s, in the Tenderloin in July 2023. Courtesy of Azalina’s

Business Coalition

As founding members of the Tenderloin Business Coalition, Eusope and Benson work with about 300 mainly small business owners in the Tenderloin and South of Market districts who are “doing their best” to improve the neighborhoods by keeping sidewalks safe and clean.

While some business owners are active in the coalition, others are not so much, Benson said.

“Some come to the meetings once in a while and they’re like ‘I get beat up when I go out my door and ask people to move,’ and then they become a little shy,” he said.

Azalina’s also tries to employ people who live in the Tenderloin, he said, but even that comes with challenges.

“We’ve had people leaving at 11 at night get robbed right out the front door,” Benson said.

Though it hasn’t been easy, “it’s part of our mission,” he said. “We hire people from the community that work there with us. We usually have six to eight staff, and right now 75 percent of them are living in this neighborhood.”

Another way to help the Tenderloin is to draw customers from other areas, Benson said.

“We’re on the New York Times restaurant list, so we get people from Boston, from New York, from other parts of San Francisco and the Bay Area that come and eat here,” he said. “Oftentimes, we‘ll get a two-star review because they’ll be like the food was great, the service was great, but that neighborhood—‘Oh, my goodness!'”

Navigating the Neighborhood

Eusope credits local resident JJ Smith for helping them “navigate the neighborhood.”

Smith is a local activist with “street cred” who regularly walks the streets of the Tenderloin talking to drug users and convincing them to get medical treatment as well as helping to keep them away from children and business storefronts.

“We could not have not done it without JJ,” Eusope said. “It’s important for us because … this is not something you learn at school.”

He knows the streets and “loves the neighborhood so much,” she said.

“Without him, we would not know how to navigate this neighborhood,” she said. “We need an advocate like JJ. He has this way of talking with the unhoused and … the highly addicted in a gentle, loving manner.”

Watching him work his “magic” on the street is “amazing” and “powerful,” she said.

Transforming the Tenderloin

San Francisco Mayor London Breed appointed Eusope to the city’s Public Works Department’s Sanitation and Streets Commission in January.

As a commissioner, Eusope says she uses her influence to work with city departments to ensure they do what they say and that there are “measurable” strides toward making streets clean and safe.

Efforts to improve the city need to start in the Tenderloin, Eusope said.

“You can’t revitalize San Francisco until you transform the Tenderloin because it’s in the heart of San Francisco,” she said. “Everybody is pointing fingers, and then we see the collateral damage when people that come here for a second chance are working three jobs. We need prosperity.”

Although she doesn’t live in the Tenderloin, Eusope spends most of her time there, and is an integral part of the community.

She rejects the pessimistic notion the Tenderloin “has always been this way,” and “will never change.”

“Like, shut up! We’ve got to change it,” she said. “It is time to stop all this.”

Pointing to the civil rights movement as an example, she said America has changed “so many policies” for the betterment of society.

‘Amplifying the Problem’

 Other immigrant neighborhoods don’t seem to have as many problems as the Tenderloin, she said.

“The rules,” on the streets in the Tenderloin, are “very different” than those in other parts of the city, such as the Marina district or Noe Valley, she said.

In the Tenderloin, “people can do whatever … and no one’s handcuffing them, no one’s putting them in a cell, but if you go to Marina, if you do fentanyl or if you’re drinking in public, they will arrest you,” she said. “It’s so strange to me.”

Inside an NGO in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, May 16, 2024. Brad Jones/The Epoch Times

Eusope blames the high concentration of social services for attracting more drug users and more problems.

“The Tenderloin has so many social services, but you don’t see these social services employees. Where are they?” she asked.“ I don’t see anyone out there,” she said. 

“We spend billions of dollars on this small percentage of people.”

Political leaders throwing money at the problem won’t make it go away, she said, adding that some nonprofits are doing great work in the community.

The Tenderloin, which she calls “a containment zone,” has been “built by design” for 65 years, she said.

“Until I came to the United States, I always thought nonprofits were doing saint work, but not here in America,” Eusope said. “They don’t want to solve the problem; they want this problem to keep going so then they keep getting this free money through taxpayers. It’s just the stupidest, messed-up thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve lived in four different continents, and I’ve never seen such things.”

‘It Has to Change’

More of a tough love approach is needed because giving homeless addicts blankets, free hotel rooms, coffee, and use of a shower only compounds the problem and breeds entitlement, Eusope said.

“We’re breastfeeding adults here,” she said. “Somehow, we think they’re babies. That’s pretty messed up. We’re not holding them accountable. We’re actually babying them.”

Even though there are plenty of public bathrooms in the Tenderloin, many “within half a block” of each other, for example, the homeless complain there aren’t enough, she said.

“They don’t want to walk. They’d rather do it on the street,” she said. “We are enabling them, and then they keep complaining. It’s never going to be enough.”

The Tenderloin, she said, needs to strive to become a low-income, fully independent community, rather than remaining dependent on social services.

“It has to change,” she said. “I just want it to be transformed in my lifetime.”

One of the obstacles to change is getting political leaders to agree on what’s best for the neighborhood, she said.

“There’s a lot of politics. They can’t get the momentum going because they’re all bickering with each other,” she said.

“Like Mr. Rogers says, anything mentionable is manageable, and anything manageable is possible,” she said, referring to Fred Rogers’ children’s show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Meanwhile, many small business owners are working 16 hours a day trying to cover costs, turn a profit, and pay taxes, she said.

“It’s hard not to be political because it’s all politics. It’s so messy, it’s unbelievable,” she said. “I’m stuck in the middle, and I care for the neighborhood.”