Last fall, chef Jay Foster owned and operated three restaurants in San Francisco: the critically acclaimed, 11-year-old soul food mainstay Farmerbrown, a brand-new Afro-Caribbean counter-service spot called Isla Vida, and a recently opened outpost of Farmerbrown at the SFO airport. Today, all but the latter have closed. In his own words, Foster shares what happened, what it means for San Francisco, and what he’s doing next. —Jesse Sparks

I’ve always loved San Francisco. I always wanted to have my own soul food restaurants there. So when I had the chance to open Farmerbrown, what would become a soul food institution in the Tenderloin neighborhood, I leapt for it. I was lucky enough to find a mentor, André Larzul [owner of Alamo Seafood Square Grill], when I was first finding my way in the San Francisco food scene. André trained me to open a restaurant without my realizing it, like Mr. Miyagi. He’d be in the middle of working, drop a one-liner, then go about his day: “Always monitor your margins, especially when they’re as thin as ours are going to be,” or, “Know the value of every penny.” At the time, I didn’t say much, but that advice helped me avoid the kinds of financial pitfalls that would’ve killed most restaurants before they got off the ground.

After six months of preparation, we opened Farmerbrown at what felt like the perfect time: It was before the tech boom, before Twitter moved into the Tenderloin, before rents in the area nearly quadrupled. And the community seemed to really like us. Of course, the first year of running the restaurant was hard—it always is. We didn’t have rich parents or a giant windfall to lean on. We were opening the restaurant on a prayer. There were times when we had to use our personal credit cards to pay our team members. My current business partner and ex-wife, Deanna Sison, and I started taking out loans to try and get ahead of the expenses of daily operations. But we never could. We just kept digging a bigger and bigger hole.

Still, we were able to settle into what felt like a really good rhythm that lasted for 11 years. During that time, Farmerbrown became more about exploring what soul food is and what it can be. For me at the time, soul food meant all the people that came in to eat, to work, to find community over a meal. As we were attracting more and more people, our landlords, formerly San Francisco natives who lived nearby, had to sell the property to a multinational real estate company. Within the span of one year, our rent went from $3,500 per month to nearly $14,000. We were working harder and later to keep up. We were still doing well and had consistently busy crowds, but the rent increase and taxes hung over us.

While all of this was going on, I started to put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed, to be one of the few Black restaurant owners and chefs left in San Francisco’s historically Black Fillmore neighborhood. I would pray to the city to let me find a way to be everything that the city’s African American population needed, in terms of representation, visibility, and influence. Some people pray to god, I pray to the city.

So in some ways, the opportunity to open Isla Vida, our Afro-Caribbean rotisserie chicken concept, felt like a way to do more for San Francisco. My partners pushed me to take advantage of the chance. I saw it as the opportunity to correct some of the mistakes we’d made while opening Farmerbrown. Unlike before, we went smaller for everything: smaller space, smaller team. But I knew from the start that things felt different. We could feel the neighborhood changing. We could see the tech companies coming in and raising rents. We didn’t have the community support like before. The spaces the Black community had carved out, the restaurants we’d established, the communities we’d become a part of, were all fading out. The San Francisco that I fell in love with was not the city we were living in. The new crowd that replaced them wanted Instagrammable food delivered to their doors without having to wait. At that point, it was even more important for me to do this, to make something for the Black community in a city that used to be composed of nearly 15% Black people, but now is less than six percent. I felt like San Francisco needed this restaurant now more than ever.