If you were to stop into the Comfort Café in San Antonio looking for biscuits, your server might surprise you by bringing up addiction. Justin Motl could greet you with, “I’m Justin; I don’t know if I’ve served you before, but I’m celebrating seven years. So if you have any questions about me or anything about the program, please let me know.”
“The program,” in this case, is SerenityStar, which operates a 6-month to a year peer-to-peer recovery center in Smithville, Texas, and sober residences around San Antonio. The nonprofit Comfort Café raises money to keep it all going. On Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, you can stop by for omelets, crepes, sandwiches, and coffee on a pay-what-you-will basis. Some folks pay the recommended minimum donation of 15 bucks, some pay less, and others contribute way more. But everyone gets served.
Many people take Justin up on his offer to share his story. “People are really interested in recovery and hearing more about it in general because so many people are affected by it. So many people have an aunt or an uncle or a mom or dad or son or daughter who’s in addiction or alcoholism,” he said. “So I think it piques an interest in them immediately. They’re like, ‘Holy shit. You mean all the cooks back there are cocaine addicts and meth addicts, and she’s an alcoholic right there? She’s the best server I ever saw.’” Other customers just come in for the eggs and skip the story.
Origin of SerenityStar
I visited one of the two Comfort Café locations in San Antonio on a Tuesday in early December, so it was closed. But Justin Motl and Jaycee Clark met me to talk about their work. Most of the tables were pushed back to make room for a huge circle for their upcoming recovery meeting. Art, album covers, and messages like “Where Miracles Happen” adorn the bright yellow walls of the large room.
Justin and Jaycee both got sober through SerenityStar. Justin has held many roles in the organization—including family director, café director, egg cook, and dishwasher. Jaycee is the secretary of SerenityStar and manages one of its recovery houses in San Antonio. Both are on the board of directors.
Jaycee told me the SerenityStar origin story. It started in 2005 when founders Teri Costlow and Rosie Lopez left New York for Texas. “They’re both in recovery,” Jaycee said, “and very early in their recovery journey, they chose to listen to their higher power, which brought them here to Texas.” They wound up in the tiny town of Smithville on the Austin to Houston corridor. “It’s so small you blink once, and you’re past it,” Jaycee said.
The two women saw the need for recovery in that area. “And the restaurant landed in their lap,” Jaycee said. That was the first Comfort Cafe. It’s still there.
“It’s like our OG, like our home base,” Justin said of Smithville. “We will all be there for Christmas.”
The SerenityStar program
The SerenityStar home base is on a 10-acre ranch in Smithville that houses about 75 residents. That’s where all newcomers start. When Justin and Jaycee described how people wind up in SerenityStar, it sounded mystical.
“We don’t advertise,” Justin said. “We really believe that as a community, the people who are supposed to come, like Jaycee, will get here. We want them to put some effort into getting into here.”
Jaycee made the effort. When she wanted to clean up, a friend sent her the number for the Smithville café. Nobody answered. “I think they picked up on the seventh phone call,” she said. “But I was persistent. I was ready to get sober.”
She completed a phone assessment and headed for Smithville. She committed to six months in the program. However, since Jaycee entered the program during the COVID-19 pandemic, she had to quarantine in a tent for two weeks.
SerenityStar draws on a bunch of different traditions and modalities, including 12-step, inner child work, Native American medicine, angelic medicine, Eastern philosophy, and yoga. There’s peer mentorship and a strong focus on overcoming codependency.
“A lot of the stuff we do is intense,” Justin said. “We heal many wounds and clear a lot of old stuff from the child within work. And then we look at the codependency as how it turns out in our adult form today.” Group meetings and one-on-ones with peers, meditation, journaling, and watching videos.
Jaycee was a hard case. “When I first got here, I was walking around looking at all these people, some smiling, and, you know, talking about shit,” she said. “And I’m just like, these fuckers are liars.” Nor was she enthusiastic about attending codependency meetings. “The codependency is such a slap in the face because most of society is codependent. And I won’t go too far down the rabbit hole, but capitalism, for example, needs us to be codependent. Let’s buy more. Let’s get more. You need more of this. You need to fix yourself with all this stuff, right? So I would hear the language in the CODA meetings and be like, these fuckers are so insane. Like this is how you live, right?” She didn’t talk in a meeting until her ninety-first day in the program.
Justin stresses that the inner child work has two aspects: the wounded child and the magical child. They tell me that to get in touch with their magical children within, they’d gone to the zoo the previous night and rode the carousel. No stranger to my magical child within, I said, “Me too!” We discussed which animals we’d chosen. Justin rode a bear, then a deer. Jaycee chose the elephant, her favorite animal. I rode the horny toad.
Both see life more deeply than the surface—even when riding a carousel. Justin tells me he works with the deer as his main spirit animal. In Native American medicine, he tells me, the deer signifies gentleness. “One of my big character defects is not being gentle with myself.”
Jaycee sees the carousel as a microcosm of life. “Like we’re all spokes in the wheel,” she said. “We’re all just different little animals on the carousel.”
Visit the Comfort Café
Every weekend, they switch from meeting mode to cooking eggs, serving the public, and raising funds to keep SerenityStar going.
Justin wants people to recognize how living in a community can help addicts turn their lives around. “We want to talk about it,” he said. “We don’t want to be those anonymous people hiding in the church basement. We want people to see there’s another option out there.” And if people just come in because of the five-star Yelp reviews and aren’t interested in recovery? “We’re still going to give them the best eggs we can make, the best biscuits and gravy we can make.”
Jaycee has done a significant turnaround since her hard case days. “We’re all happy to be alive, and there’s no shame in being an addict or an alcoholic,” she said. “Once you step in these doors here at any of our locations, we hold such a vibratory level that we’re breaking the stigma of what society thinks an addict or an alcoholic looks like.”
We contemplate the “Where Miracles Happen” sign on the far wall. “I thought it was the biggest load of BS,” Jaycee said, “until the miracles started happening. And then I became the miracle, and I get to show up and be that person for the next person, just like someone showed up for me.” And that’s what Comfort Café and SerenityStar are all about.
Resources:
- SerenityStar Website
- Comfort Café location
- SerenityStar Facebook
- Comfort Café on IG @comfortcafesatx
Short Interview with Justin and Jaycee
It’s always the perfect day for a perfect day! SOBRIETY IN THE CITY is your guide to substance-free adventures and events in cities across the United States. We’re bringing you hidden gems, local hangouts, art exhibits, unique attractions and pop-up events, limited shows, and tours. Being fully present allows us to enjoy life to the fullest. But we’re still taking it all in, just one day at a time.
You can depend on SOBRIETY IN THE CITY for clean, creative alternatives to make the most of your time in these amazing cities. CLICK HERE FOR OUR NEWLY LAUNCH SOBER EVENTS CALENDAR
If you have the perfect sober city movement agenda, reach out to us! We would love to share your ideas with our community. DM us on social media or email us directly at thesobercurator@gmail.com.
WHAT A TRIP!: We trip as often as possible because sober travel is our jam! Here, you’ll find insider information, travel tips, sober retreats calendar, and honest reviews from a sober perspective.
Did you have a life-changing, globe-trekking sober trip you would like to share? We would love to share your travel tips & pics with our community! Send us a postcard or write to us at thesobercurator@gmail.com.
SOBERSCRIBE NOW!
Resources Are Available
If you or someone you know is experiencing difficulties surrounding alcoholism, addiction, or mental illness, please reach out and ask for help. People everywhere can and want to help; you just have to know where to look. And continue to look until you find what works for you. Click here for a list of regional and national resources.
