Popular San Francisco bakery closes ‘indefinitely’ due to fire

A popular San Francisco branch of worker-owned cooperative bakery Arizmendi will remain shuttered for the foreseeable future after a one-alarm fire broke out in the kitchen Thursday morning.

A sign posted to the front window of the 23-year-old bakery near the corner of 9th Avenue and Irving in the Inner Sunset said “everyone is okay” but that some equipment was damaged. The location will need to be closed “indefinitely” until repairs and inspections can be completed. 

The small blaze was contained to the chimney flue of an oven, Justin Schorr, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Fire Department, said in an email. Firefighters were alerted by 911 dispatchers at approximately 10:25 a.m. Thursday and 40 of them arrived at the scene within minutes, extinguishing the blaze by 11:22 a.m.

Arizmendi was not immediately available to provide more information by publication time, but the bakery’s voicemail message had been changed to inform customers of the closure. The bakery continued to sell products out of its window until 5 p.m. Thursday and has been closed since Friday

“We’ll probably have to close for a few days weeks (or more) to fix it,” read an update on Arizmendi’s website. “We’ve turned off online ordering for now… Sorry!”

It’s not the first time one of the cooperative’s locations has been forced to close due to a fire. In 2018, a person drove a Volvo into the electrical closet behind Arizmendi’s Emeryville location, which contained a gas line and caused a fire. The store’s fire sprinkler system caused additional damage; the bakery did not reopen until 2020.  

Four other sister cooperatives remain open, including Arizmendi’s locations on Valencia Street in the Mission District, Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, the aforementioned Emeryville location on San Pablo Avenue and on Fourth Street in San Rafael. The Cheeseboard on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, where Arizmendi’s roots began more than 40 years ago, is also operating with normal hours.