Dishing Up Dignity : Cafe Offers Meals, Job Training to Those Down on Their Luck

Dignity and self-reliance were on the menu the other day at one of Los Angeles’ most unusual restaurants.

Out front in the cheery dining room, a homeless man named Milton Billingsley was listening to a Chopin sonata and admiring the vase of flowers on his table while he waited to be served brunch.

Back in the crowded kitchen, a former drug addict named Constance Schuler was trying to turn servings of spaghetti and cole slaw into something she hoped would look as good as it tasted.

It was business as usual at the Bread and Roses Cafe, a Venice restaurant that caters to a uniquely exclusive clientele: the homeless and unemployed.

For 3 1/2 years, the cafe has offered free hot meals to the down and out. Guests make reservations in advance and a maitre d’ seats them in the cafe’s pink-walled, Santa Fe-decor dining room. Volunteer waiters serve coffee, juice, entrees and dessert.

Volunteer chefs are assisted by students enrolled in a food services job training program that operates in conjunction with the restaurant.

The 42-seat restaurant is run by the Venice-based St. Joseph Center. It is a nonprofit community agency that has a day center that provides showers, laundry facilities, telephone service and mail boxes for the community’s growing number of homeless.

The restaurant’s three daily seatings accommodate a total of 126 people.

“This place is a little bit of sanity,” said Billingsley, 50, a onetime construction superintendent from Bakersfield who lives in a tent in La Tuna Canyon. “The food lines at other places can be humiliating.”

The restaurant is providing even more to Schuler. She hopes that the Bread and Roses Cafe will launch a new career for her. Not to mention a new life.

Schuler, 40, said she was caught stealing to support a drug habit and was headed to prison for a fourth time when she was diverted into a rehabilitation program at Tarzana Treatment Center. Officials there enrolled her in the Bread and Roses job-training course four months ago.

“Working here opened my eyes. It’s a new day. I have a new attitude,” Schuler said.

Forty-three jobless people have gone through the food services course, said coordinator Addison Goodson. Thirty-one of them now work in the commercial food service field.

The cafe’s unpaid chefs help with the instruction, Goodson said. They also look out for potential trainees among the cafe’s dining room clientele.

Scot Kirkwood, a chef at Ava’s restaurant in the Beverly Center, said his twice-weekly stints at Bread and Roses give his creative side a workout. That is because the cafe relies on donated food and inexpensive bulk items.

“I’ve done things with Desert Storm military dried beef that I never imagined doing,” he said.

The restaurant, which operates on a yearly budget of $133,000, relies on grants, donations and on such money-makers as car raffles, said St. Joseph administrator Kelly Hayes-Raitt.

Some donations--such as day-old bread contributed regularly by a bakery--have taken an unusual route to the Rose Avenue restaurant.

Cafe coordinator Rose Harrington said she bumped into the bakery owner by accident.

“I was driving along Pico before Christmas and I skidded on some oil in the street and sideswiped his car. We got to talking afterward and he ended up saying if we ever needed anything to give him a call,” she said.

“So I did.”

Some of the cafe’s homeless clients say they discovered the restaurant by accident, too. Through an agreement with its Venice neighbors, Bread and Roses does not advertise its location. And its guests come and go by a discreet rear entrance, said Rhonda Meister, executive director of St. Joseph.

Jon Greene, 40, a laid-off Texas oil field worker living out of a backpack at a Westside National Guard armory, learned about the restaurant from others at a homeless encampment in Topanga Canyon.

“It’s a privilege to be able to come to a place like this,” Greene said, lingering over coffee and a croissant. “It’s almost like living a normal life again.”