Off the menu: S.F.’s diners
High rents, changing tastes forcing many low-priced coffee shops to shut
When Stanley and Stefanie Yang posted a handwritten “We lost our lease” sign on the door of their Lafayette Coffee Shop on Hyde and Eddy last week, the news occasioned outrage and sadness more than it did surprise.
It was one more disappearing diner, after all, the latest in a year-long string of notable casualties: Lucky Penny, Manor Coffee Shop, Sparky’s Diner and Pacific Court Cafe have all closed in the past 12 months.
Somewhere between twoand three-dozen diners or neighborhood coffee shops remain in San Francisco, with names like Tennessee Grill, Silver Crest Donut Shop and the Bashful Bull Too. Their decor ranges from restored Deco to formica and grease stains. The default serving size is a platter, the average coffee ration a quart. Their food can be good or bad, but it is never special. Special, after all, isn’t the point. Familiarity is. These are restaurants where regulars spread an open newspaper across the table for an un-
hurried read, and where the server sets the check down and waves your hand away from its reflexive reach toward the wallet.
That was very much the feel of the Lafayette Coffee Shop, where the dim, worn furnishings had an air of familial permanence, each knickknack forgotten in place. The diner was better known for its fat, round sign, whose only working neon letters spelled out “Prime Rib,” than for the restaurant’s actual roast beef.
The Yangs took over the Lafayette Coffee Shop a decade back, when Stanley’s uncle, who had run it for more than 30 years, retired. They inherited Mei, longtime server and empress of the dining room, and loyal customers who would eat one or two meals at Lafayette every day. “In the Tenderloin, a lot of people don’t have a kitchen in their home, so they come to us,” Stanley Yang said.
Spurned by landlord
When Lafayette’s lease was up several months ago and the landlord refused to answer their requests to negotiate a new one, Stanley Yang suspected an eviction was forthcoming. But he was still surprised to receive a 30-day notice from the landlord’s law firm.
In the finals days before the cafe closed last Sunday, the Yangs’ notice invited a rush of farewells. “For the last few days, we’ve been busy,” he said Monday while packing up anything he could move. “Everything sold out. It’s so sentimental.”
You’d think the slow death of diners in San Francisco is simply a matter of times moving on. Outside the city, chain restaurants have taken their place. Here, rising costs as well as changing tastes may be responsible. Many of the new restaurants opening have counters, but they face bottles of high-end spirits, not coffee machines and a flat-top griddle. Given rents, it’s more profitable to sell $13 cocktails than $7 plates of eggs over easy with hash browns and two thin slices of toast. That may be why the outflow of diners is never refreshed by new ones.
Yet the public hasn’t abandoned these older restaurants, especially during the morning hours. Weekends bring lines to Art’s Cafe in the Inner Sunset and the Cove on Castro Cafe. The city’s collective love for scrambled eggs and flapjacks — which are relatively inexpensive — keeps many businesses around.
Loyal customers
Helen Hwang, who has owned Eddie’s Cafe for 28 years, said that even as Divisadero has transformed from the Western Addition’s main commercial drag to NoPa, a stretch of high-end restaurants and design shops North of the Panhandle, she has been able to draw new customers without alienating the long-standing ones who occupy the red pleather booths on weekday mornings. She owed it to good food.
“This place is the best,” agreed a man at the counter, a stiff-walled baseball cap worn high on his head. When asked what his regular order was, Hwang interrupted him: “Two strips of bacon, extra crispy, scrambled eggs.”
Adoration aside, the changing city has left diners and coffee shops more exposed to evictions and economic distress.
Lucky Penny, a tiny standalone building on a larger lot, closed to make way for tall condos. Last fall, the same fate appeared to loom over the Grubstake in Polk Gulch, when new owners filed a preliminary project assessment to raze the building — though last week, manager Johnny Metheny reiterated that busi- ness was good and there were no plans to follow through.
In November, San Francisco voters passed Proposition J, which will create a Legacy Business Historical Preservation Fund. A representative of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, which will administer the fund, says the Small Business Office is putting together regulations and a budget to submit to the Board of Supervisors for approval later this spring. The mayor or members of the board will be able to name businesses to a Legacy Business Registry, offering technical assistance to business owners and possibly rent stabilization funds to owners of the buildings that house them.
A few other diners have survived changes of ownership. Al’s Cafe Good Food in Bernal Heights shut its doors in April 2011 when the owners retired, but new managers cleaned up the place and reopened two months later. An even more striking remodel restored Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the Portola 18 months after its owner died and the building was sold.
Planning to reopen
Manor Coffee Shop in West Portal, which closed in the fall of 2015, is hoping to make a similar renaissance. Michael Gonzalez bought the business from Raymond Jeung, whose parents founded it in 1969. Gonzalez, a former private chef raised in San Francisco but trained in France, has been pouring money into repairing and updating the place as he prepares to reopen.
Gonzalez said locals have scrawled messages like “Please don’t change” onto the window and accused of him of plotting to Frenchify the food. “I’m like, don’t worry,” he said. “I can’t keep it the same because I’m not doing what ( Jeung) did. But I want to keep it a diner.”
The Yangs, too, are scouting for spaces in the neighborhood, looking for something that can replicate Lafayette Coffee Shop’s 1960s-era American decor. “We’ll try to duplicate it, just in another location,” Stanley Yang said. The regulars want him to keep the name, menu and even the color of the walls the same.
Of course, he has to find an affordable lease. And affordable leases, for a restaurant that advertised $7.95 pot roasts on Mondays and $12.95 prime rib dinners on Saturdays, are hard to come by.
“We’ll try to duplicate it, just in another location.” Stanley Yang, speaking of his recently shuttered Lafayette Coffee Shop