The Buena Vista Cafe is undoubtedly a San Francisco institution. The iconic bar sits next to the Hyde Street Cable Car, as so affectionately mentioned by iconic SF writer Herb Caen, but it’s often most known for its Irish Coffee.
The bartenders have the drink down to a science, making the boozy coffee in long rows as the buzz of the busy bar swirls around them. The saloon proudly claims to be the bar responsible for bringing Irish coffee to the United States, and it’s all thanks to a San Francisco writer.
SF Chronicle travel writer Stanton Delaplane first drank the cocktail at Foynes Airbase in Ireland. According to the Foynes Flying Boat Museum, head chef Joe Sheridan of the base’s restaurant first made the drink when a flight had to return to the base due to bad conditions. The chef put whiskey in the crew’s coffee after the long flight and jokingly called it Irish coffee when one of the passengers thanked him for the drink. SF writer Delaplane would eventually encounter the drink, which obviously made an impression because he is said to have brought it back to Buena Vista Cafe which started serving it in 1952.
It took several people to create theBuena Vista’s perfect recipe for Irish Coffee. First, the owner of the bar, Jack Koeppler, asked Delaplane to help him recreate the drink the writer encountered in Ireland. The pair was able to find the perfect Irish whiskey, but the cream was presenting a problem. Instead of floating to the top, it would stubbornly sink to the bottom of the glass.
Their solution? Enlist the SF mayor, George Christopher, who happened to be a diary owner. Christopher discovered that aged cream combined with just the right amount of frothing would lead to the perfect floating finishing touch to the drink.
Since then, people have flocked to the cafe for a classic Irish coffee. The Buena Vista still uses the originally recipe more then 70 years later. The bar itself opened in 1916, after being converted from a boarding house. The main clientele in it’s early years were fisherman, although now you can find everyone from tourists to SF natives drinking at the bar.