Michele StuevenIn a 12,000-square-foot space that used to be a bikini factory in Huntington Park, legendary chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken have opened the Feed Folks Border Grill Catering Commissary. The new facility combines commercial catering with breakfast, lunch, and dinner for food-insecurity and homelessness-relief initiatives in Los Angeles.
Divided into different sections in addition to the corporate office space, about 2,500 meals go out to homeless shelters every day from Feed Folks, including Wesley Health Centers and The People Concern via grants.
The goal is to employ three shifts a day, seven days a week, in the massive kitchen that preps a couple of cases of cilantro a day, with 36 bunches in a case, and houses smokers and state-of-the-art standing ovens programmed via web browser that can steam, smoke, convection, and contain different temperatures in the same unit and can schedule different cooking processes ahead of time. The two walk-ins are the size of some people’s entire kitchens.
Feed Folks Border Grill Catering Commissary prep kitchen (Michele Stueven)
A project four years in the making with a sixth sense of the future to come for LA restaurants, Milliken and Feniger, like many local chefs, have leaned back into their original catering roots to survive.
The pair’s two restaurants, SoCalo and Alice B., both closed this year. They still operate their 14-year-old LAX outpost as well as a restaurant in Mandalay Bay and a fast casual location at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. A Border Grill kiosk will open at the new Hollywood Burbank airport in November.
“The restaurant business across the country is very tough, and LA has really gotten hit in a big way, “ Feniger tells LA Weekly during a tour of the facility. “At one point you just have to ask yourself how much more money you want to pour in to see if it’s sustainable. It’s sad. We started here with City Cafe 1981. It’s the first time in 46 years that we don’t have a restaurant in LA.”
Stars of one of the original Food Network shows, Two Hot Tamales, Feniger and Milliken had many sobering sit-down conversations about the future in what some outlets are calling a “restaurant bloodbath.”
Mise en place at Feed Folks Border Grill Catering Commissary (Michele Stueven)
“People aren’t going out to eat as much,” she says. “They figured out during COVID that they could cook, which is great. Then the fires hit us, the writers’ strike hit us, the economy, and lack of tourism. Then there’s the cost of goods for restaurants. You’re paying more in the grocery stores, and so are we. Combine that with scared workers not showing up for shifts. Many are Hispanic and don’t want to risk getting deported. We had many conversations – where are we at, what the costs are, and how we can make changes- plus we had this under construction.“
Still, the partners are always evolving and encouraged about the future.
“We’re excited about the opportunity, but it’s something new to us,” Feniger says. “Diversifying is our way of maintaining business. We still have to tackle more things for it all to make sense. It’s exciting and scary.”
Remembering friends at the commissary ofrenda (Michele Stueven)