At CCSF's Downtown Center, a Pastry Class Savors Its Last Semester

Aly Yee leaves her home in Livermore at 5:20 a.m. She drives to the Lafayette BART station, rides into the city, and walks to the Downtown Center — over an hour each way. Last May, Yee graduated from Cal High, and now she's only weeks away from completing her baking and pastry training at City College. "No student debt for me," she said.

Upon arriving at the Downtown campus, lab aide Shirley Chan is already at the entrance. The building isn’t officially unlocked for another hour, so Chan opens the door and greets each student. 

Down in the basement kitchen, stations are wiped down, sanitation buckets are filled. The Advanced Baking and Pastry class starts at 7:10 a.m., but most students arrive well before then. By 6:45, nearly everyone is there. By 7:45, the baking is underway.

The class runs six hours a day, five days a week, and students who complete both the introductory and advanced courses receive more than 1000 hours of training. Graduates have gone on to work at Jane the Bakery, the Ritz-Carlton, the Fairmont, Devil's Teeth, Bourbon Steak, and many more. One is an instructor at the SF Baking Institute.

Next semester, everything changes. Elizabeth "Chef Betsy" Riehle, who built the program and has led it for 20 years, is retiring to spend more time with her family. The program will move from the Downtown Center to Ocean Campus.

Two days before classes began this semester, the introductory class was cancelled, leaving the advanced cohort with the kitchen to themselves and too few people to run their beloved weekly pop-ups. On April 16, the class will host one final sale at the Educated Palate Cafe downtown.

In the Kitchen

On a Wednesday in mid-March, the kitchen's industrial fans are battling a heat wave. It's 86 degrees outside and 85 in the basement. 

Despite the heat, everyone wears crisp white chef coats with their names embroidered in black thread. Chef Betsy wears the hat you picture when you think of a chef: comically tall, with paper pleats.

Riehle spent 25 years in the industry before coming to City College, and she doesn't like to talk about herself much beyond that. What she will talk about is the work and her students, but she'd rather show you than tell you.

Mid-sentence in our conversation, she spots something across the room, breaks away, and is suddenly at a student's station with her hands in the dough. She is left-handed, and she works methodically, delicately.

She moves this way all morning, station to station. She coaches Irene Edgai on tempering chocolate — "I'll do it as a demo, but you need to narrate what I'm doing" — then zips across the room to help Yee model a chocolate rose. Yee gazes at Riehle's hands as she shapes each petal.

Butter gets rolled out for lamination. Delicate croissant dough is shaped into crescents and loaded into the oven, where it spins and grows golden. Notes of melted chocolate, almond syrup and sourdough starter permeate the kitchen.

When Terry Ku pulls her baguettes from the oven and frowns at the one that came out shorter than the rest, Riehle tells her, "Don't look at the sixth one you don't like. Look at the other five that are perfect."

Riehle quotes Eminem: "This is your one chance, your one opportunity." The Pointer Sisters: "I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it." She tells the class to do it with passion, to be themselves while they're baking.

"She's like a radio," Yee said. "It makes the kitchen goofy and fun."

Maria Sandoval, who is considering a move to New York to create plated desserts, feels lucky to have had the opportunity to learn under Riehle. "Chef Betsy makes everything that sounds difficult feel very possible, even easy," she said. "She makes me believe in myself."

With fewer than 15 people and no intro class, the group has grown close. Maddison McCauley, who has a 3-year-old and a six-year-old at home, started a Discord server for everyone to connect outside the kitchen. “Aly [Yee] was born when I graduated high school, and now we're besties," McCauley said.

Gloria Pouncil first enrolled during COVID. She got her certificate online but never touched an industrial oven or weighed ingredients on a commercial scale. So she came back. Then came back again — this is her third time through. "I cannot get this from anybody else," she said. "There's no other place I'd rather be."

At the chocolate station, Edgai is making cigarettes. The thin, rolled pieces of tempered chocolate require specific pressure, speed and precise measurements. On a normal day, it's exacting. In a heat wave, it's adversarial.

Edgai's hands hurt from the pressure. She tries different angles, waits for Riehle to check her most recent batch, and prepares to temper at least two more times before the day is done. "I've had many teachers in my life," Edgai said. "She is amazing. City College is losing a very valuable person."

The Educated Palate

The pop-ups started in 2023, when in-person classes returned after the pandemic. Before COVID, the Downtown Center housed the Educated Palate, a restaurant run by students in food technology and dining services. That program ended, and the space sat empty for three years. 

"When we returned post-COVID, it was bleak," Riehle said.

She claimed the empty dining room and reimagined the space as a cafe, and each Thursday, students sold reasonably priced baked goods to the downtown community. "It caught on," Riehle said. "It generated positive energy for this corner." 

An SFGate article compared the pastries to those at Tartine and highlighted the prices. Lines formed. The Educated Palate Cafe had become the best deal in the neighborhood.

When the intro class was cancelled this spring, the advanced cohort lost more than half its usual workforce. The students voted: with fewer than 15 people, running a weekly pop-up wasn't feasible.

Production continues — pastries and breads travel to Ocean Campus, and extras go to the nonprofit Food Runners — while the bakeshop sits empty.

But Riehle wanted to give the students this semester one more shot, one more opportunity, so they’re bulking up production for a final pop-up on April 16. "We are so excited," Pouncil said. "It really takes a village to pull it off."

As for the program’s location, Culinary Department Chair Jennifer Rudd said that she couldn't, in good conscience, put a brand-new instructor alone in the Downtown Center. Instead, the classes will run in the afternoons at Ocean for roughly two semesters while the Chinatown campus kitchen is fitted out.

As an evangelist for the program, Pouncil worries about what comes next. "I just don't want the program to get lost in the shuffle," she said.

There's a small retail cafe on the first floor of the Chinatown building that has never been used. "The dream is," Rudd said, "a year from now, year and a half, we'll have pop-ups happening at that little cafe."

Until then, Riehle will shepherd this final group to graduation. While class was winding down, she turned her internal radio to Sarah McLachlan, calling out to the room: "We're fumbling towards ecstasy!"