The man behind the coat-check counter took a break from arranging the garments of strangers. He paced across SFMOMA’s lobby towards the museum’s cafe. Behind him, two large canvases flanked both sides of the main entrance hall. As he stepped away from his station, Julie Mehretu’s diptych, HOWL, eon (I, II), provided him with a dramatic backdrop. Their emotional impact would have been negligible had the artist made them small enough to post on a refrigerator door.
HOWL’s scale is meant to have an American-sized impact on the viewer, reflecting the chaotic nature of an unruly citizenry and its angry governors. Pausing for a cup of coffee, the coat-check clerk appeared to step out of and away from Mehretu’s howling world.
Cafes offer a reprieve from daily office routines and errand runs. Museum cafes provide that same sense of escape, but they also serve as gateways to and from imagined people and places. In one of two dining areas, Jane on Third looks onto Third Street or into SFMOMA’s lobby. That second dining room, adjacent to the lobby, also houses one of Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s cheerful murals.
Amanda Michael’s office at the museum, in contrast, is white-walled, windowless and sparsely decorated. But it’s strategically situated behind the kitchen, where the founder of Jane the Bakery can hear the clatter of plates and pans reverberating in the hallway.
Michael told me she started Jane during a pause in her culinary career. In college, she’d started working in kitchens and fell in love with baking. “Not to date myself too much but if you were a female in the kitchen, pretty quickly you were relegated to pastry,” she said. The daytime hours of a baker came to suit her later responsibilities as a mom. “You could go in early and finish up.” But Michael stepped out of the workforce when her second child was born because, “You don’t make enough money to pay for childcare.”
When her kids were older, Michael wanted to return to work on her own terms. “I realized I was a little bit unemployable at that time, you know, just opinionated,” she said. Then in 2011, things “came together in a really great way” for the first location of Jane on Fillmore Street. Michael and her family lived nearby. Without a business plan, she proposed a cafe and bakery before realizing that they’d have to add a food menu to pay the rent. “Cookies and coffee wasn’t going to cover the bills, so we came up with the breakfast-and-lunch format that’s very similar to what we do today,” she said.
The menu has evolved since then. It’s much bigger now, but the general, all-day dining concept with a focus on baking and “healthy, good food” has consistently remained in place. Since 2011, Michael has gone on to open six more locations. Jane on Third is the seventh. The rate of expansion for her has been deliberate and careful, she said. The company hasn’t taken money from outside investors.
“Once you take money and become an investment, your mission changes,” she said. “Success is determined by dollars, not quality, and you’re beholden to somebody else.”
Going to each of the seven locations every day isn’t a practical approach to managing the business. But in the course of a week, Michael will visit each store at least once. “If I’m in Marin, I’ll go see those two stores and try to spend a good chunk of the day with the teams there,” she said. She’ll work with the bakers on new recipes or discuss holiday menu plans. “We’re always working on new things so I try to get my hands in as much of that as I can.”
When Michael initially opened on Fillmore Street, she didn’t have a long-term plan in mind. “I just knew what I wanted to do with the first store,” she said. When the company needed more space, she was willing to take certain risks. “I don’t have a problem working hard,” Michael said. “I love a challenge, and I like figuring stuff out. For me, I would just rather take the chance.”
Jane on Third, 151 Third St., First Floor, San Francisco. Fri-Wed 9am to 6pm; Thu 9am to 8pm. itsjane.com/location/jane-third
