not a "feel good" story, but there's a moral
Irish coffee: S.F. elixir on brink of extinction
Warren Hinckle, Special to The Chronicle
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Paul Chinn / The Chronicle
Buena Vista Cafe bartender Paul Nolan crafts Irish coffees in the specially made, fast-disappearing glass.
Flahoolick is an Irish word meaning openhanded, generous and expansive. It has long been a matter of settled opinion in the San Francisco bar business that the Buena Vista Cafe is un-Flahoolick.
The Buena Vista sells more Irish coffees a year, mostly to tourists, than all the gin mills in America combined. Other saloons swear the Buena Vista has bought up the unique glasses essential to make the famous San Francisco Irish coffee recipe and hoards them in a secret stash.
The Buena Vista "is sitting on them all, nobody else can get any," said Ron Minolli of Gino and Carlo.
"They won't share," said Jeannette Etheredge of Tosca. "It isn't fair."
The Irish coffee for which this town is so well known is made in a 6-ounce glass, demanding precision to recipe and rewarding the success of the pour with an experience that has been likened to rapture.
"The love is at the top where the cream sits," says Seamus Coyle, the battle-scarred veteran of many shifts behind many planks from the Opera House to the avenues, describing the engineering of the drink.
The essential ingredient is the 6-ounce glass, which the Buena Vista once used to make gin fizzes. It possesses miraculous properties of heat retention and its relatively small size - most bar glasses are 8 ounces or more - creates the perfect balance of whipping cream, Irish whiskey (1 1/2 shots) and coffee (not too much).
No other vessel will do
Making San Francisco Irish coffee in any other vessel would be like making sourdough bread without the starter. "If we ever run out of those glasses, it would be the end of Irish coffee in San Francisco," Buena Vista accountant Ron Davis told me.
Now the Buena Vista faces the real possibility of running out of the very glasses it has made other bars do without. How San Francisco Irish coffee has ended up an endangered species is a tale of plain old greed and a management miscalculation. There are no winners, but the big loser is San Francisco.
Irish coffee was conceived in 1943 in an airport restaurant on Foyne's Island in the River Shannon hard by the formerly walled city of Limerick. The airport was the hub for Pan Am's pioneering transatlantic flights aboard "flying boats" - seaplanes that landed and took off in the water on pontoons.
The father of Gaelic coffee, as it was then called, was Joe Sheridan, a merry and wise chef whose sweetie was rumored to be actress Maureen O'Hara (the reader may recall her as the redhead John Wayne dragged by the hair through the fields in "The Quiet Man" in one of the more magniloquently misogynistic scenes ever filmed).
A movie star's drink
The movie star was often in transit at Foyne's Island, where she sipped from the cup of Sheridan's creation, a hot drink for shivering travelers awaiting flights in the long, cold Irish night. Sheridan dolled up the traditional Gaelic mix of strong whiskey and strong coffee by floating an inch of heavy cream on top and adding a heap of brown sugar to take the chill away.
Chronicle columnist Stanton Delaplane first delighted upon Sheridan's special coffee when passing through Foyne's Island airport as a war correspondent in 1945. When Delaplane began writing his travel column, he returned to Ireland in 1952 and took the formula for Gaelic coffee back to San Francisco, where he christened it Irish coffee. Delaplane's widely syndicated columns extolling Joe Sheridan as an inventor ranking alongside Edison made both Sheridan and San Francisco Irish coffee famous.
When Delaplane first brought Sheridan's secrets home to the Buena Vista, he confronted a problem that kept him and owner Jack Koeppler up for many days and nights: how to make the cream stay at the top of the glass.
The solution came from George Christopher, who owned a dairy farm and would become San Francisco mayor. Christopher suggested aging the cream for two days before pouring so the clotted cream would hang up there like a celestial cloud as the divine mixture of Irish whiskey and coffee - like the grog on the Pequod hot as Satan's hoof - passed through the cooling rich cream for a taste of heaven. Their improved recipe also replaced the brown sugar with three California & Hawaiian white sugar cubes at the bottom of the glass.
By the early 1960s most neighborhood taverns and every North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf restaurant stocked the totemic glass to serve San Francisco's own Irish coffee. "Irish coffee became synonymous with a visit to San Francisco," said liquor historian Steve Beal. In tribute, the manufacturer's 1964 catalog changed the name under the glass from "gin fizz glass" to "Irish coffee glass."
The Buena Vista, with its huge, captive tourist trade at the end of the Hyde Street cable car line at Fisherman's Wharf, soon enough cornered the Irish coffee market and began squirreling away 6-ounce glasses. Manager Larry Silva disavowed any evil intent and said the Buena Vista needed to stockpile as many glasses as possible because the tourists just kept coming.
Intent or not, the result was that, in recent years, when a neighborhood tavern tried to reorder Irish coffee glasses, it was invariably told by a distributor that none were available. "A mortal sin," said barman Coyle.
Last summer, Tosca owner Etheredge raised the alarm about the disappearing Irish coffee glasses. She said her historic North Beach operatic bar (now the nocturnal headquarters for the movie colony) had been using the identical 6-ounce glass for more than 60 years for its signature house cappuccinos. She was down to only one backup case and couldn't find another supplier because the Buena Vista had "hogged them all."
A plea to Buena Vista
I asked the Buena Vista to help her out by selling Tosca some of its stash. Manager Silva was unfamiliar with the Tosca - "I don't live in the city," he said - but asked Etheredge over.
"They were rude and treated me like a tourist and sent me to the gift shop and then would only sell me two cases, and at tourist prices (more than $4 for a glass that costs $2 wholesale)," she said. "This is really not how people in the same business in San Francisco should be treating each other."
Etheredge then ordered a different heat-tempered glass for Tosca's signature alcoholic hot chocolates and white nuns, but is still mad that she can no longer make Irish coffee in its original glass.
"It's all the Buena Vista's fault," she said.
Silva's response was that the Tosca owner had "acted like the Queen of England when she came here." He said he had been busy on the phone negotiating with China to manufacture San Francisco Irish coffee glasses. I suggested that he was perhaps unaware of some of the rigid protocols of the North Beach bar world, and that it was in any event not nice to mess with Mother Nature.
On Aug. 1, 2008, the manufacturer Libbey, of Toledo, Ohio, stopped making San Francisco Irish coffee glasses, declaring them "obsolete." The irony was that Buena Vista was still pouring bazillions of Irish coffees in those very glasses.
Jason Gore at Libbey said his marketing department determined that the rest of the country had lost interest in the 6-ounce glass, and since the single largest buyer, the Buena Vista, hadn't reordered, they canceled production.
Libbey has the patent on mold No. 8054. I asked what it might cost to recast the mold and crank up the machinery. The man from Libbey said that because the item had been "discontinued" there would have to be a minimum order of "10,000 dozen glasses" at an approximate wholesale cost of $250,000. And if you order that many glasses at once, you have to pay big time to store them.
Saloons making do
As Irish coffee glasses became unavailable, San Francisco saloons began using the stock on hand. Gino and Carlo makes Irish coffee in wine glasses. Ditto O'Reilly's. The Balboa Café uses a tall glass mug with handles, Highway 101 on Van Ness a dainty Ikea breakfast-set cup.
Chuck Davis, bartender at Bing Crosby's old Powell Street hangout the Gold Dust and Lefty O'Doul's on Geary (they share ownership and recipes), is using an Iron Maiden-thick 6 1/2-ounce wineglass to hold the heat, and atop the cream he sprinkles gold dust in the manner of the miners of '49 who topped their coffee and Bushmills with real gold for good luck.
Stores now advertise "Irish coffee" glasses of 8 ounces or more, which are useless for the classic San Francisco recipe. There is either too much coffee or too much booze.
Bar didn't reorder in time
Silva seemed vague about how the Buena Vista had failed to keep its line of supply alive. His immediate predecessor as Buena Vista manager had more specific recall. Michael Carden, who now works at Castagnola's on the wharf, said that before he took medical leave in 2007 Libbey had agreed to make "short runs" of 1,000 cases when the Buena Vista's supply ran low.
"They screwed the pooch when they didn't reorder in time," said Carden, who is serving the original Irish coffee recipe at Castagnola's in his own stash of eight cases of the now-rare original Irish coffee glasses; he said the Buena Vista had, well, watered down the recipe, substituting two sugar cubes for three and other atrocities.
Last summer I tracked down the Hayward warehouse where the Buena Vista keeps its stash of glasses. There were 120 cases on hand - rather alarming since the Buena Vista usually maintains about a 500-case backup, as it goes through more than 200 cases a year from breakage and theft and tourists taking home engraved souvenir glasses at $22 a four-pack.
Manager Silva said not to worry - he had a big new shipment coming from China. When I checked with him last month, Silva made a lame joke about slow boats. He said the glasses finally arrived in December, three months late. "They were all too thin, the weight was off, they couldn't hold the heat."
He had to ship all the glasses back to China.
When I called him last week, Silva said that a "slightly improved," smaller Chinese replacement shipment had recently come in. The glasses were "better, but still barely suitable, still not as good as the American stuff," he said.
But the born optimist said they would be sufficient, along with some backup cases he had cached away "in people's basements and garages" - the Buena Vista has no on-site storage facilities - to keep pouring San Francisco Irish coffees, for tourists for now.
Buy American
Silva is once again thinking of buying American. He is in talks with Cardinal, a Libbey competitor, about rushing a run, say, in the 1,000-case range. Wasn't that the size order that former manager Carden had left him to be activated? (There might be a hitch to that plan because rival Libbey owns the patent on the San Francisco Irish coffee glass.) One can only wish the Buena Vista good luck and godspeed.
The sorry state of San Francisco's iconic Irish coffee has not been previously reported and, in truth, it is not yet with O'Leary in the grave, although it has one foot in it. Unless the Buena Vista can save the sanctity of its present business by finding, in quantity, the right glass at the right quality and learns, as one does in kindergarten, to share, the city's drink of legend will remain dead in the neighborhoods and faces a shabby future even for tourists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owae3_OlV_M&feature=player_embedded
About the author: Warren Hinckle is a fourth-generation San Franciscan who formerly worked as an editor and columnist at both the San Francisco Examiner and The Chronicle. He is the editor of Argonaut, a publication founded in the city in 1987, and previously edited Ramparts and Scanlan's Monthly magazines. E-mail Warren Hinckle at
[email protected].
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle last Sunday
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