The building at 4712 Felton Street used to house the Jackson Electric Company. For most of the block's history it was the kind of address you'd drive past without registering, a working commercial shell one block south of Adams Avenue's restaurant row. Now it holds a 5,000-square-foot cafe and garden, and if you order the turmeric chicken bowl on a Saturday morning, the person who plated it may not be there by Halloween. That's not a staffing problem. It's the whole design.
MAKE Cafe opened on Felton Street in late June 2026, and most of the early coverage treated it the way outlets treat any new brunch spot: hours, address, a photo of the congee. What that framing misses is the mechanism underneath the menu. This is not a restaurant that happens to do some good in the community. It's a twelve-week job-training program that happens to serve food to the public four days a week, and understanding that order of operations changes what a plate here actually represents.
What You're Actually Ordering
MAKE Projects, the nonprofit behind the cafe, was founded by Anchi Mei in 2017 and has since moved nearly 400 refugee and immigrant women through its workforce program. The name stands for Merging Agriculture, Kitchens and Employment, and the acronym describes the literal path a trainee walks:
- Weeks 1 to 4: Work at MAKE's one-acre farm near Snapdragon Stadium, a sliver of land tucked under the trolley tracks in Mission Valley, learning to grow, harvest, and pack the produce that will later show up on the Felton Street menu.
- Weeks 5 to 8: Move into the cafe kitchen to prep, plate, and run food alongside the culinary staff.
- Weeks 9 to 12: Rotate to the front of house as baristas and cashiers, closing out the paid, 185-hour program before graduating into the job market.
That means the woman making your oat milk latte in September is different from the one who made it in June, and different again from whoever takes over in December. The cafe's staff isn't a fixed team building a following the way a chef does at a neighborhood mainstay. It's a relay, and every twelve weeks the baton changes hands. Executive Chef Ashley McBrady, who has cooked in Portland, Denver, and San Diego kitchens including You & Yours Distilling Co. and Cellar Hand, put it plainly to a reporter this summer: reading a recipe functions the same as any other job skill, it's about showing up, communication, and drive. She's not training cooks. She's training people who happen to be learning through food.
The Menu, and What It Costs
The globally inspired daytime menu draws directly from the trainees who pass through it. Expect ginger rice congee, a crispy lentil kofte wrap, and cardamom-coconut brioche donuts alongside a straightforward breakfast sandwich. Mei's own favorite is the turmeric chicken bowl, built with greens, sesame vinaigrette, garlic rice, shaved vegetables, a Somali biz baz sauce, peaches, feta, and cashew dukkah, priced at $17. Her more indulgent pick, the roasted banana crepe with almond granola and caramelized banana chai cream, runs $14. Seating is available inside or out in a courtyard with nine garden beds growing lettuce, eggplant, tomatoes, corn, summer squash, scallions, herbs, and flowers, some of which end up on the plate in front of you the same season.
The prices sit in line with any farm-forward brunch spot in the neighborhood. What's different is where the margin goes. According to Mei, the cafe currently runs at roughly 25 percent self-funded, with the remaining 75 percent covered by grants and donations, though the goal is to shift that ratio toward self-reliance over time. Ordering the $17 bowl isn't just a transaction. It's a small subsidy toward a training slot for the next woman who walks through the door.
"It's so hard to attend an apprenticeship or training program, when you have kids or family responsibilities," Mei told a reporter this summer, describing why the cafe-restaurant model exists at all.
Why the Doors Are Closed on Wednesday
MAKE Cafe is open Thursday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday and Tuesday are dark entirely, and Wednesday is set aside as a staff training day. On paper, a four-day week with a built-in closure looks like a struggling operation hedging its hours. In practice, it's the opposite. The closed days aren't a limitation the business is working around. They're curriculum.
That distinction matters if you're trying to figure out how to fold this place into a weekend routine. There's no walk-in Tuesday lunch option here, and there won't be one anytime soon, though the organization has said it plans to add occasional evening service and continues to host private events and catering on the side. For now, the rhythm is deliberately narrow: four public days, one closed day for teaching, two days dark.
One Graduate, Not Yet a Statistic
Numbers like 400 women and 30 countries are easy to skim past. Maria Castillo doesn't skim past as easily. At 66, she spent late August working the front of house at MAKE Cafe, making drinks and getting ready to graduate from the three-month program. She'd spent years working as a babysitter and told a reporter this was the first time she'd worked in a structured program with coworkers. That's the kind of detail a spreadsheet can't hold, and it's also the reason the twelve-week rotation matters more than the menu. The cafe is a means, not an end, for the people running it.
What This Means for Your Adams Avenue Loop
Felton Street sits one block south of Adams Avenue, close enough to fold into an existing walk without adding real distance. It's a short stretch from the Kensington-Normal Heights Branch Library, and the fitness crowd at The Yard Gym on Adams overlaps neatly with a menu built around organic, locally grown produce. If you're already looping past Bosforo or one of the coffee shops on Adams for a weekend routine, MAKE Cafe fits into that same footprint rather than asking you to plan a special trip.
The cafe also runs a CSA subscription through its Mission Valley farm, giving neighborhood residents a way to get the same seasonal produce that ends up on the menu delivered to their own kitchen. It's a second entry point for anyone who wants a relationship with the place beyond a Saturday brunch.
None of this makes MAKE Cafe a typical new opening. Typical openings are built around a fixed chef's point of view, refined over years and defended against turnover. This one is built around turnover as the point. The next time you walk in, ask who's working the counter, and don't be surprised if the answer is someone who wasn't there last month. That's not inconsistency. That's the twelve weeks working exactly as designed.
If you're curious about what else has changed on this stretch of Normal Heights lately, our guide to what's worth walking to on Adams Avenue rounds up the other recent arrivals worth knowing about, and our full Normal Heights neighborhood guide covers the rest of what makes this pocket of the city work. For updates on MAKE's farm, CSA boxes, and cafe hours directly from the source, MAKE's own site is the place to check before you go.
Nick Emerson and the Emerson Group keep a close eye on what's changing block by block in Normal Heights, Mission Hills, Hillcrest, and Middletown, because the small stuff, a new cafe, a reopened bar, a rezoned corridor, is often the first signal of where a neighborhood is heading next.
