The lunch line at the Harbor Light Center formed in what seemed like an instant, 80 bodies coalescing in the dining room at the Salvation Army’s SoMa residential drug and alcohol treatment program.

Anthony Rizzi, Harbor Light’s chef, stood at the kitchen window, composing plates for each person who stepped up. With a cleaver, he lifted slices of herb-marinated chicken onto a couscous salad flecked with Castelvetrano olives, peppers and parsley. He squeezed a zigzag of yogurt sauce over the meat, adding to it a spoonful of spicy chile-walnut paste for the consenting. Each bowl received a shower of fresh herbs before Rizzi handed it over.

Harbor Light is not one of those recovery spas that advertise their pools and rugged-valley views on television. Participants in its programs come from Tenderloin SROs and suburban law firms alike; some stay for 60 days, others for up to two years. Yet Rizzi and his tiny kitchen crew are demonstrating that cooking in an institutional setting doesn’t mean churning out institutional food.

“Anthony doesn’t just cook,” said Maj. David Pierce, who oversees programming at the Salvation Army center. “He makes it an event.”

This is actually Rizzi’s second time running the kitchen; he returned to the job after taking off a year to travel around the world with his fiancee. Rizzo, who studied nutrition in college and cooked around San Francisco after graduation, first heard about the position from a co-worker, and found himself turning the idea in his head: How would he run a kitchen that served three meals a day, plus mid-meal snacks, to upwards of 100 people?

When he landed the job, Rizzi encountered a freezer stacked with boxes of burger patties and chicken parts, as well as bags of preboiled eggs and jars of shelf-stable beef paste (for flavoring stews) in the walk-in. The weekly menu was made up of hearty food-for-a-crowd dishes — spaghetti with meat sauce, pot pies — and the kitchen crew, some of whom had once been residents themselves, could execute their duties with little oversight.

The new chef thought they could do more. He placed orders with the same produce and meat companies who supplied the restaurants he had worked at. He started the cooks prepping fresh vegetables and making stocks from bones. Rizzi, who had taught English in Vietnam for three years after college, introduced ingredients he’d come to love in Asia. The global scope of his menus spread with each week, intensifying when he returned from his round-the-world trip. Chinese Muslim cumin lamb. Cod with Sicilian caponata.

“There’s no telling what country he’s going to take you to,” said Jose “Sonny” Lecue, the center’s breakfast cook. Both cooks and residents say they rarely see a dish repeated.

While Rizzi served lunch, assisted by a resident dishing out salads with homemade blue cheese dressing and green tomatoes the kitchen had pickled a few days before, Joey Bronk, the dinner chef that night, dredged pork chops in breadcrumbs in the back of the kitchen. The pork, he pointed out, was from Berkshire pigs, a heritage breed.

“Some people say, ‘Ooh, fancy,’” Rizzi said. “But I’m not trying to be fancy. My style is good, home-style food with fresh ingredients.” The chef can afford good-quality pork chops and chicken — not to mention the guinea fowl and oxtail now in the freezer — because he serves 5 ounces of meat a person, not 10, and because he buys fresh ingredients and jiggers the menu to eliminate waste. He’s removed the Capri Sun machine that ran perpetually in the dining room and replaced it with fresh-fruit aguas frescas. (The coffee vats, constantly refilled, are going nowhere.)

In fact, Rizzi has reduced Harbor Light’s food costs by 20 percent without paying more for staffing. “Some food service managers don’t have the imagination to adjust the meal planning according to what’s available in the food banks and what’s on sale,” said Maj. Pierce. “We’re fortunate that he’s able to pull from a lot of different ideas and make a good meal.”

Some of the diners in the lunch line studied their plate quizzically for a few seconds before sliding their tray down. Others exclaimed over the dish. Rizzi greeted many by name, and urged a few to try foods they initially shied from.

“I can order what I want, cook what I want, which is fun from a personal standpoint,” Rizzi said. “But you don’t abuse it.” When he serves Vietnamese dishes whose flavor reverberates with fish sauce, he offers an alternative. An experiment with baby octopus didn’t go down well.

The effects of good food go far beyond titillating the diners. Blonk, the night’s dinner chef, says that he has been in recovery, and knows the comfort a plate of freshly baked cookies can deliver. “If we have the opportunity to give residents something to heal through the power of food, I’ve done something good,” Blonk said.

Dr. Paul Abramson, whose My Doctor Medical Group in San Francisco offers outpatient addiction treatment services, sees nutrition as an underrecognized but key component of recovery. Many people who have been abusing drugs or alcohol for a long time develop vitamin deficiencies, he said, even to the point of malnourishment.

It’s not just a matter of vitamin levels. “Certain kinds of foods feed the same pleasure-craving pathways in the brain that drugs and abuse of alcohol serve,” Abramson said. Hence the ubiquity of coffee and sugary snacks at recovery meetings. He recommends that patients eat more vegetables and fruits, good-quality meats, and much fewer sugars and processed carbohydrates. “Feeding people nourishing, whole diets of real food makes people do much better.”

Back to Gallery Chef’s fine touch at Salvation Army rehab kitchen 6 1 of 6 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 6 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 3 of 6 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 4 of 6 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 5 of 6 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 6 of 6 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle











Rizzi bobbed and deflected each time he was asked whether he approached his work at Harbor Light with a deeper sense of mission. He talks about his clients as if they are regulars at one of his restaurants, albeit ones who don’t order a la carte. “I don’t ask them about their personal business,” he said. “I’m just happy to feed them.”

Around the lunch table, some of the residents joked that the food was so good they had to watch their waistlines. Others have told Rizzi that they’ve lost weight.

One man dropped his bowl off at the dishwashing station and leaned in through the kitchen door. “I’m going to tell Michelin about you, Anthony,” he shouted. With an inch-high nod of thanks, the chef turned to the next customer in line.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com. Twitter @jonkauffman