The Mill, the Divisadero Street café and bakery that somehow came to stand for an entire era of San Francisco, is closed indefinitely after a fire ripped through the back of the building early Monday morning.
The San Francisco Fire Department said it responded to reports of the blaze at 736 Divisadero around 2:28 a.m. and contained it to the business before it could reach the buildings on either side. No one was hurt, no one was displaced, and the department has deemed the cause accidental, according to a statement it gave Gazetteer SF. Video posted by the SFFD shows the damage concentrated at the rear of the kitchen and a section of the roof; firefighters can be seen tearing into the back wall to chase down hot spots. By the time the morning coffee crowd started showing up, small piles of charred debris were sitting on the sidewalk next to The Mill's parklet.
The café confirmed the closure on Instagram. "Everyone is safe, just in shock," the post read, adding that The Mill would be closed until further notice while the owners figure out how to move forward.
The Mill is not the only Divisadero anchor a fire has taken out this month. It is the second.
Che Fico, David Nayfeld's wildly popular California-Italian restaurant two blocks up at 838 Divisadero, has been dark since June 11, when a fire the Fire Department traced to a chimney flue on that block forced it to close for repairs with no reopening date. Nayfeld has said that the restaurant would be rebuilt and come back "better than ever," and said Mayor Daniel Lurie, Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, and the city's economic development chief Ned Segal had all reached out. Now the same fate, and the same indefinite limbo, has landed a few doors down.
Monday was worse than one fire, too. A couple of hours after The Mill went up, a two-alarm fire broke out at the San Francisco Central Seventh-day Adventist Church at California and Broderick, roughly half a mile up the corridor, prompting a shelter-in-place order and unhealthy-air warnings across the surrounding blocks, according to the SFFD and the city's emergency management office. The 1892 church was wrapped in scaffolding at the time. That makes two structure fires in the greater Divisadero area in a single morning, and at least three significant blazes within a few weeks, in a neighborhood that was, until very recently, mostly known for its brunch lines.
The Mill opened in 2012 as a joint venture between Four Barrel Coffee and Josey Baker Bread, two businesses sharing one airy, skylit room around the corner from Alamo Square. Then it accidentally became famous. The Mill's thick, hand-cut toast, sold for what was then the scandalous sum of four dollars, launched a thousand think-pieces in 2013 and 2014 about a city losing its mind; "$4 toast" became national shorthand for tech-boom excess and the question of what San Francisco was turning into. The price has since crept into the five-to-eight-dollar range, which tells you everything about the intervening decade.
The cultural footnote obscures the fact that the place is, genuinely, very good at bread. Josey Baker Bread mills its own flour on-site, and The Mill serves as the operation's main production hub. The Chronicle recently crowned it the maker of its favorite sourdough loaf in the Bay Area. As SFist noted, that means the closure could pinch the citywide supply of JBB loaves until the bakery is running again, on top of pausing the popular bread- and pizza-making classes the café hosts and shutting, for now, one of NoPa and Alamo Square's reliable daytime gathering rooms.
No fundraiser has been announced as of Monday, though commenters were already asking The Mill how they could help. For the moment, the answer the café offered was simpler and sadder than a GoFundMe link: it is still figuring out how to come back. Given the month Divisadero is having, the whole corridor will be waiting to hear that it can.
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