San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
An ode to our own Hippo Burger.
Beloved ‘glamberger jernt’ was a destination for birthday parties and latenight antics
Restaurants are reopening, and we may no longer need to romanticize their very existence, but there is a lingering yearning for one particular place that brought different walks of life together in San Francisco: Hippopotamus Hamburger, a spot that hasn’t been in business for 34 years.
Hippopotamus Hamburger (a.k.a. Hippo Burger, Hippo’s or the Hippo) was located in the space that’s now a CVS Pharmacy on Van Ness and Pacific from 1950 to 1987. Inside were giant whimsical cartoon hippopotami created by actual German nobility: Baron Wolff Erhardt Anton Georg Trutzschler von Falkenstein. Known as Wolo von Trutzschler, or Wolo for short, he was a beloved children’s book illustrator and puppeteer.
Those Wolo hippo cartoons live on today: They have an online life in unofficial merch and rarity auctions. The Hippo is a staple vintage San Francisco restaurant logo for several Tshirtondemand companies. A FireKing coffee mug with Wolo’s bowbutted girl hippo recently turned up on eBay from a seller based in Japan with an asking price of $950. Every so often, and as recently as a few weeks ago, one of the 117,000plus members of a nostalgiadriven Facebook group called San Francisco Remembered brings it up: “Who remembers the Hippo on Van Ness?”
The hippos themselves partly explain why the restaurant is still alive in the Bay Area consciousness. With their big, warm and slightly blushing smiles (and even bigger butts), they would have been perfect for the Instagram era. The theme extended to the bathroom, where toilet seats were shaped like hippo mouths, and some lucky kids got to go home with a stuffed hippo, which some lucky adults still have.
But they only explain part of why Hippo holds an outsize place in locals’ memories. Hippo was a destination for birthday parties and latenight antics, for afterschool snacks, postprom bites and postpunk show reveling. It was a cultural icon of its time, filled with outlandish burgers, celebrity sightings and children, though not always at the same time.
“Hippo’s was one of the country’s first gourmet hamburger joints, a place that served as a social and cultural intersection in the city of St. Francis for nearly four decades,” Ken Garcia wrote for The Chronicle following owner Jack
Falvey’s 1998 death at 84. “It was a place where people congregated after proms, after balls and after bowling ... a spot that was simple, elegant, much copied, yet never trendy.”
The Hippo came from the mind of Falvey, a 1929 Lowell High School graduate who had an animaltheme business empire. He was a serial entrepreneur who opened a successful liquor store in the late ’40s called the Giraffe Liquor Shop. He later had the Monkey Inn, a singles bar behind the Hippo.
He was also a world traveler, which may be why Hippo had such an eccentric menu with more than 50 burgers inspired by international cuisines. Where hamburgers in San Francisco and across the country were fairly plain at the time, Hippo’s options included the Cantoneseburger with canned lychee sourced from Chinatown, a Japanese countrystyle Kyotoburger with a soy and mayobased sauce and a Russianburger with spicy red cabbage and juniper berries, to name a few. Falvey’s outofprint “Hippo Cook Book,” released in 1969 on Nitty Gritty Books from Concord, has recipes for dishes such as San Francisco Curry Sauce (which contains apples, curry powder and ketchup, among other ingredients), Iranian Salad Dressing (with Burgundy wine and three kinds of vinegar) and A Typical Balkan Meatloaf (with steak, bacon, rice, cinnamon and nutmeg).
The menu’s appeal was in its overthetop creations with ties to no particular cuisine except ostentatious American. An Inflationburger cost a million bucks, and a Hamburger Sundae — one of its wackiest, bestknown creations — came with real ice cream. The concoction piled vanilla ice cream and hot fudge on a burger patty, plus a sliced pickle, a maraschino cherry and nuts. Though the cookbook doesn’t include a recipe for the Hamburger Sundae, Falvey reveals the inspiration: an OBGYN with an office across the street. The Hamburger Sundae was, um, conceived in honor of the cravings of pregnant women.
The wideranging menu was served from 11:30 a.m. until 1 a.m. on school nights and until 3 a.m. on weekends. Depending on the hour, Hippo was as much a family spot as it was a notfamilyfriendly spot. Late at night, it was open for crowds that funneled out of music venues, bars and strip clubs.
During the day, birthday parties for children were a big deal at the Hippo, says San Francisco artist Marsha Vdovin. “They put sparklers on a burger,” she says. “It scared me (as a kid)!” And daring friends to try the Hamburger Sundae after school — or while cutting class — was a rite of passage. My childhood plea for a Hamburger Sundae received a parental veto, and last week, I finally found out why: Dad still carries the boyhood trauma of his best friend embarrassing him by ordering him a Hamburger Sundae in front of everyone, and how gross he thought it was.
“It was kind of a workingclass experience, just part of being a kid in San Francisco,” says Gayle Pirie, owner and chef of the popular Mission District restaurant Foreign Cinema, of going to Hippo.
At night, Falvey’s role as a society man about town came into play. His businesses and philanthropic endeavors were a staple of the late Herb Caen’s columns in both the San Francisco
Examiner (from 195058) and The Chronicle. Caen called the Hippo a “glorified glamberger jernt” when he covered the May 31, 1950, opening night, referring to the fact that notable locals had shown up for the debut.
Later on, people like Bing Crosby and ballet stars Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were known to go to the restaurant, according to news clips and the cookbook.
“Dame Margot and Nureyev came in, ate a ‘Hippieburger,’ then went to HaightAshbury and got pot luck! What luck!” Falvey joked in his cookbook, referencing their San Francisco arrest for being at a party where cannabis was found — an incident that The Chronicle later called “The great Haight ballet bust of 1967.”
“The great Tennessee Ernie Ford ordered a Diet Steak and gave us a plug on his national network show,” Falvey continued. “Bing Crosby eats just a plain hamburger — ditto with Pat Paulsen.”
The restaurant was also a magnet for criminal high jinks, according to crime stories published in the Examiner. In 1964, a staffer with a cash box was robbed by two men at gunpoint and locked in the boiler room. Three years later, Falvey was robbed of $800 and
handcuffed inside the restaurant. SFPD tried 24 keys before one finally loosened the handcuffs.
The universal nature of the restaurant is something that Falvey recognized in his cookbook. “Actually, in San Francisco everyone eats at The Hippo,” he wrote. “I suppose that’s the interesting and charming part about this Hippo kind of restaurant operation. You may sit next to a Black Panther or a priest, a whitetie opera goer or a ‘hippie,’ a worker in soiled overalls or a whole Japanese camera clicking group.”
Despite Caen’s affection and the restaurant’s beloved status, the Hippo was not exactly a critical darling of The Chronicle food department.
The Hippo “looked like a piece of Disneyland had broken off and floated up to sophisticated San Francisco,” former Chronicle restaurant critic Patricia Unterman wrote in 1983. The basic onethird pound charcoalgrilled burger was solid and satisfied her afterhours cravings, but she wasn’t fond of the sauced burger options and awarded one star for food.
“One great thing about the Hippo is that it stays open late,” she concluded.
Still, Hippo represented a moment in time in food, where “international cooking” was popular, Unterman, now a restaurateur, said of the Hippo, after recently being shown a copy of her 38yearold review. “It didn’t go towards authenticity, but it sure was fun and it was a real cultural moment, as I recall.”
Elsewhere on the menu were items that might be common today, such as burgers without buns and tartare, a plate of raw ground beef that was cheekily called the “Cannibalburger.”
And Pirie of Foreign Cinema said
Hippo influenced her Mission District restaurant in a tiny Hippo toe print way, too. She’s developed recipes from the cookbook (outofprint copies of which are available online for around $30), including a riff on the relish made from diced pickles and homemade ketchup; the sauce on the burger at Foreign Cinema is also inspired by Hippo.
Falvey also had “incredible integrity” when it came to his burger methodology, Pirie says — with tactics like grinding meat fresh daily and not pressing the burger on the grill so that the juices remained. “I would say that the Hippo burger didn’t inspire the Foreign Cinema burger, but aspects of our signature burger are derived from inspiration from the integrity of the Hippo,” Pirie says.
When Hippo closed, Caen remembered it fondly as the passing of a place where so many San Francisco locals had grown up. “Thousands of local kids had their first burgers there, as kids before them had their first sundaes at longgone Blum’s,” he continued. “Where else can you still get a decent burger (with mayo) for under $5, plus free onsite parking and, unfortunately for Jack, no waiting? The Hippo, with its great logo by Wolo, was ahead of its time but never became trendy. Was that its problem?”
Surely, Caen was just teasing again. Thirtyseven years in the restaurant business in San Francisco is a great success story, and Hippopotamus Hamburger lives on in spirit.
S.F.’s beloved Hippo Burger, top, on Van Ness Avenue drew people from all walks of life for its overthetop menu. The restaurant’s outofprint cookbook, inset, and an illustration, left.