The Fillmore restaurant Nia Soul Cafe just opened last month after owner Pia Harris’s 15-year quest to make her catering business a brick-and-mortar restaurant. But Harris died from pancreatic disease complications just weeks after its grand opening.
Pia Harris opened her SF-based Afro-Caribbean catering business Nia Soul Food in 2009, all along hoping to grow the idea into a brick-and-mortar restaurant. That dream became a reality just last month, when Nia Soul Cafe finally opened in the former Scott's Chowder House location at Fillmore and Ellis streets.
But Harris was quietly suffering from non-cancerous pancreatic growths during the opening process, and was hospitalized for a procedure at CPMC Medical Center just a week later. She remained hospitalized, and now the Chronicle reports that Harris died from complications on December 3. She was only 46 years old.
“Everybody loved Pia. She had the sweetest smile,” Harris’s surviving mother Adrian Williams told the Chronicle. “Pia was always helping the underdog, that was her thing. She was patient with people and could help them define and implement their goals.”
Pia Harris was born in Daly City on Mother’s Day 1978, and attended both Galileo High and Washington High. She eschewed attending college because she hoped to become a restaurateur here in San Francisco, and climbed the ladder as a longtime manager at the now-defunct Gussie’s Chicken and Waffles in the Fillmore. But she was starting Nia Soul Food even while working that job.
Yet Harris accomplished plenty more during those years. She served as the chief economic development officer of the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation, and would co-organize the Fillmore Juneteenth and Western Addition Music festivals. She established the Minding My Own Black Business program which distributed $1.2 million in grants to 90 Black entrepreneurs, and was the driving force behind the In the Black small business incubator in the Fillmore in 2022.
Her legacy will live on, besides just the continued operation of Nia Soul Cafe, now being managed by Harris’ daughter and her partner Ira Barker. The SF Housing Development Corporation will open a commercial chef training kitchen in her honor this coming year, and Harris had also already laid the groundwork for the reopening of the Peacock Lounge.
“It’s hard without her, but I feel great that we are pushing everything she wanted to do,” said Barker, now operating Nia Soul Cafe. “Keeping her dream alive is all any of us want to do.”
Services celebrating the life of Pia Harris are scheduled for this Saturday, December 21 at Third Baptist Church at 1399 McAllister Street.
Related: Napa-Based Celebrity Chef Michael Chiarello Dies at Age 61 [SFist]
