On the December day I stopped at Azalina Eusope’s 6-month-old restaurant in the Tenderloin, she’d just been granted Eater’s “Chef of the Year” award, which praised her eponymous business as “a bright ray of sunshine in the middle of the city.” The accolade was one of many the Malaysian immigrant earned for her restaurant, including being named one of the best restaurants in San Francisco by the New York Times and the Chronicle. By all rights, she had an incredible, enviable year.

But when I sat down with her in the restaurant’s dining room, filled with murals and draped with vines, the fifth-generation street food vendor held her head in her hands and told me she was at the end of her rope.

Her food, a modern take on Indian Muslim Mamak cuisine, is singular; the service, warm and on-point. Yet on many nights, the 34-seat restaurant seats only five diners, total.

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Chef Azalina Eusope is Eater’s “Chef of the Year” and her restaurant, Azalina’s, is on the best lists of the Chronicle and the New York Times. Yet on many nights, the 34-seat restaurant seats only five diners, total.

Neighbors are always popping in, thanking her for opening such a beautiful restaurant in an area that’s so often denigrated and dismissed as hopeless by the outside world. “Please don’t leave!” they beg her. Once a week, she hosts a meal for low-income families who pay $5 each, and it means a lot to her to provide a safe, sane space for neighborhood children. And, perhaps most of all, it’s been her longtime dream to establish a concrete foothold for her family’s cultural cuisine.

“Closing isn’t an option,” Eusope said.

But despite the fame and the community support, she cannot figure out how to make the numbers work. She’s tried selling pre-made meals to local grocery stores to diversify the business, and she uses a set menu to control costs, but it’s still not enough to turn a profit. At this point, Eusope, who is entirely self-funded, is too anxious to look at her bank statements to see how much of her savings have been depleted.

Here in San Francisco, we’re all about our great food scene. We pour so much sentimentality into restaurants, lauding them as essential third places, marks of sophistication and a rare avenue for social mobility. And we hold them to high standards. On top of impeccable food, they should provide good jobs, affordable price points, meaningful cultural experiences, good service, and sustainable ingredients and practices that make us feel good. Eusope provides all of that and more — but it’s a pursuit that she’s starting to consider “suicidal for business.”

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A scrappy, talented, self-made immigrant woman with a dream, Eusope is exactly the type of person the city says it cares about when it touts its reputation as a city of innovators. Her food helps make San Francisco such a special place to live.

Yet this city is among the toughest places to make restaurants work. And Azalina is a case study on the seemingly impossible math of keeping a business afloat here.

People dine during a private family and friends dinner at Azalina’s in June. On most nights, though, the restaurant has only a handful of customers.

The monthly rent on Eusope’s Tenderloin space is $11,000, an amount locked in when she signed the lease in 2018. Even as the pandemic forced her to close and subsequently gutted demand, she told me, that her Burlingame-based landlord, who owns several properties in San Francisco, has been unresponsive to her requests to adjust the rent to an amount that better reflects the........

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