By Paul Reidinger

OXYMORON FOR OUR time (a time of morons, some running for election, others for re-): "jobless recovery." Yes, say the wise ones, the economy is getting better and better every day, and please just ignore those huddled masses yearning to be employed. The Bush campaign savants seem to presuppose a high degree of cognitive dissonance in the population (another example: our splendid little war in Iraq, in which being attacked daily is, according to the president, a sign of success), and perhaps they are right.

It is hard to walk around San Francisco these days and not see signs of the ongoing labor void – the For Rent signs, say, that keep popping up, and staying up, in apartment windows. At the same time, builders of lofts and town houses still seem to be going great guns, as San Francisco continues to transform itself from a real city in which actual people live and work into some novel combination of urban suburb (live here, work elsewhere), spa for the leisured rich, and theme park for visitors, complete with charmingly antique rides – cable cars, vintage street cars, and whatnot.

A friend suggested recently that during the recent economic boom, or bubble – or aneurysm – even many of the socially and psychologically marginal were able to find work: a version of the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats nostrum beloved of President Kennedy and perhaps part of the explanation why the streets did not, for a time, seem quite so cluttered with the destitute and desperate. Of course, the other side of the equation is, as we see now, far more painfully true; those who were holding on by their fingertips in flush times have been the first to fall away as the economy, or at any rate the stock market, joblessly recovers.

It is a Darwinian, Malthusian, Dickensian, Spencerian environment. Yet it is not entirely a hopeless one; here and there a lighthouse does shine on the rocky coast. One such is Café Phoenix, an unassuming breakfast-and-lunch place that opened in June on the eastern shoulder of Potrero Hill, a neighborhood defined by an elevated freeway, lumbering trucks, warehouses, and – of course – a large serving of the outgoing mayor's live-works or condos or whatever they are.

It's a neighborhood that could use a good café, and now it has one. But Café Phoenix isn't a typical business venture; it's an extension of a program called Hire-Ability, which helps people with mental and emotional difficulties find their way in the employment marketplace by learning usable skills, such as those you'd need to run a café.

If you did not know this, you probably wouldn't guess it. The space is sunny, clean, modest – redolent, I thought, of a well-kept junior high school cafeteria – the staff pleasant and efficient, the food unimpeachably tasty, and inexpensive. It is, as befits the setting, mostly plain food – honest food, with the occasional well-managed twist.

You can have, for instance, the sandwich version of a chile relleno ($5.95). The lineup includes a sautéed chicken breast, two kinds of cheese (Jack and cheddar), and of course slices of roasted and skinned, though not battered and fried, Anaheim (or some sort of comparably mild but flavorful) chile pepper. On the side: a blob of no-nonsense potato salad.

I like potato salad, but I like french fries better. Café Phoenix offers the latter two ways: as spicy home fries, which would have cost $2.25 as a stand-alone item but were only $1.25 as an accompaniment to, for example, a pastrami sandwich ($4.50), on sliced sourdough with peperoncini and olives; and in their more familiar, thinner (and not spicy) guise as sidekick to a tuna melt ($6.25).

The tuna melt looked disturbingly plain – like something you might be sullenly served on a no-frills airline or in one of our newly built prisons. Just toasted white bread lined with slices of cheddar cheese, and a wan salad of tuna and mayo in the middle. But ... the bread was fresh and tender, the cheese full of bite, and the tuna salad nicely pumped up with some sun-dried tomato, the '80s-chic item, now largely neglected, that seems due for a renaissance.

A chicken-dumpling soup ($3) seemed to consist mostly of diced celery, with just a few shreds of chicken and a handful of gnocchi-like dumplings bobbing about. But it was flavorful and, surprisingly, not at all bitter despite the flood of celery. (Celery, I once read, is the caloric equivalent of seawater; it takes more calories to digest than it provides, so it is not merely the perfect, though hardly alluring, diet food but could actually erase you if you could somehow manage to eat enough of it.)

And I felt slightly let down by the personal pepperoni pizza ($3.75), which contained a single, lonely round of pepperoni, like the only survivor of some unimaginable catastrophe in the oven. Sad. Still, the crust was nicely bready, the tomato sauce pungent with oregano, and the kitchen did not stint on the cheese. Solace is always in those sorts of details – redemption and hope, too.