San Francisco’s oldest Russian bakery is finally ready for its next act. On Friday, August 28, the second location of legacy business Cinderella Russian Bakery & Cafe debuts in the Mission District after only 73 years in business.
Much of the new location
will feel familiar to Cinderella regulars. There will be the many stuffed, fried piroshki, of course, meat-filled pierogi, and the vegetable-loaded borsch. The bakery’s sweets are also coming along, including that famous burnt honey cake, a selection of breads, and cookies, including the popular hamentashen, and coffee from Ritual. The menu will be nearly identical to the Richmond shop. (Dinner offerings — and expanded hours — will soon follow once the team gets their sea legs after opening.)
But the expansive 3,500-square-foot space is also meant to give Cinderella owners Mike and Marika Fishman the opportunity to stretch the business in ways that their Richmond location can’t. For customers, what that means is an expansion of their cake and bread lineup, plus plenty of indoor seating, which the other space lacked. The couple says they also plan to grow their wholesale operation and have expanded catering options. “Over there we can only do so much, it’s limited production with one oven,” Mike Fishman says of the original location. “[In the Mission] we have two double-deck ovens; we can spread our wings, hopefully, with time.”
The Mission location was a long-overdue expansion. The 1,600-square-foot Richmond space, which the Fishmans lease, could only accommodate so much, especially as the bakery’s popularity grows and longtime customers expand their families with new generations. The Kaluda family first opened Cinderella in 1953, operating in the historically Russian Richmond District. The business changed hands in the 1970s when sisters Lydia Repin and Eugenia Belonogoff took over. Mike Fishman and his family immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1987; by 1991, the Fishman family bought the business, and a teenaged Mike learned much of Cinderella’s core recipes from Lydia, such as the piroshki, kulich, and some of the soups.
But Mike Fishman’s added to the bakery’s legacy, too; he expanded his baking knowledge through classes at the San Francisco Baking Institute, and brought in the popular burnt honey cake to the bakery, along with the morning pastries and croissants. When Mike and Marika Fishman officially took over the business from Mike’s mother in 2008, they did what they could for the longtime Balboa Street shop, redoing the space and adding new options to the menu, like bread, sandwiches, and coffee.
But the Mission location hit a number of bumps along the way to opening. The Fishmans first bought the former La Victoria bakery on 24th Street in 2018, a shop with nearly as many years under its belt as Cinderella, eventually unraveling due to family disagreements over the business, after nearly 70 years. (La Victoria eventually reopened under 12-year employee Laura Hernandez and her partner Danny Gabriner, who moved the business to 3249 24th Street in 2019.)
Still, the Fishmans were met with resistance from the neighborhood, who wanted La Victoria to return to its original space, as Mission Local reports. The pandemic further halted forward progress on the building, and banks were also hesitant to loan money to food businesses, Mike Fishman remembers. Eventually, those bumps in the road were in the rearview mirror, as the Fishmans worked with the Latino cultural district and met various conditions to make the bakery a true partner to the neighborhood, including installing a colorful 12-foot-high mural by artists from Precita Eyes, the collaborative arts organization based in the Mission. “We’re so excited to be in this neighborhood,” Mike Fishman says.
Cinderella Bakery (2937 24th Street, San Francisco) debuts on Friday, August 28, and is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.
