Owner and chef Raul Garcia Antolin has reached a point few people hope to reach.
“The time has come to close the doors,” he said of Caliente Bistro Kitchen, located at 4828 Geary Boulevard.
Despite being one of the most highly rated Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood, the Mexican restaurant at the intersection of Geary and Funston will close in September.
Paying rent on time has been an issue, Garcia Antolin said.
Garcia Antolin came to the decision after a “sad conversation” with her landlord on Thursday night: “I no longer have her support.”
Garcia Antolin, 50, a former culinary instructor at Mission Language and Vocational School, opened the restaurant in May 2021 with his business partner.
He currently owes his landlord about $45,000 in rent, which he says he has paid on time each month but is now unable to pay in full.
Garcia Antolin's landlord, who persuaded her to close her shop, said the situation was causing her a lot of stress and that “she has to pay her bills first.”
Garcia Antolin applied for business loans and city grants, but was rejected.
He blamed last year's wet winter for the slump in sales. The restaurant made a healthy profit from catering during the holiday season, but sales have dwindled since then. Rain and relentless winds in one of the city's gloomiest neighborhoods discouraged customers from dining out, he said.
Caliente Bistro Kitchen was well-located, nestled between a car dealership and a gas station on Geary Street, Richmond's busiest commercial district, but Garcia Antolin found it difficult to gain local attention.
He said whenever there's a big event elsewhere in the city, like a Warriors game at Chase Center, people disappear.
“People flock together,” Garcia Antolin said. “It's amazing how something so small can have such a negative impact on business.”
At 11 a.m. on a recent Thursday, the kitchen was filled with the smell of frying chicken and the sound of metal spatulas moving on the grill. A chef, his sleeves neatly rolled up, was preparing chicken enchiladas: grilled chicken wrapped in corn tortillas toasted in a special sauce. “No sour cream, please,” a customer requested.
The secret, according to the chef, is to generously oil the grill when you place the tortillas on it, which “makes the sauce taste like butter.”
On a Thursday lunchtime, the restaurant only had a few tables filled, but plenty of people dropped in to pick up food, including a resident who lives upstairs who walked straight through the gate and into the restaurant as if he'd done it hundreds of times before.
After the owners posted about the impending closure on Nextdoor, Richmond neighbors showed their support: Just an hour after the restaurant opened, a container of salsa was already half empty, the chef proudly showed to a reporter.
Garcia Antolin's cooking career began as part of a court-ordered community service assignment: “I was a really bad kid,” he recalls, when he was 17. His sister, who was working in a restaurant at the time, offered to take him in.
After washing dishes and sweeping the floor for a while, the chef handed him a knife and asked him to peel an onion. Garcia-Antolin did it so quickly that the chef was amazed.
At the same restaurant, Garcia-Antolin filled in for other chefs during rush hour, then enrolled in a culinary program at City College. Another chef at the restaurant gifted him his education and paid for all of his expenses. After completing the one-year program, his career officially began when he went to Las Vegas in 1994 to become a chef. “And I never looked back,” he says.
The closure of Caliente won't put a stop to Garcia Antolin's career: He still wants to open another restaurant.
But there were things he would have done differently — no full-service, more branding, maybe even a big “taqueria” banner out front — and for Garcia-Antolin, all of Caliente's struggles were a lesson in “how to fail well.”
Caliente Bistro Kitchen is located at 4828 Geary Blvd. It is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
