SF Throwbacks
This article is part of SF Throwbacks, a feature series that tells historic stories of San Francisco to teach us all more about our city’s past. It’s also an excerpt from Alec Scott’s book, Oldest San Francisco.
By Alec Scott
Founded in 1861 and still in the same spot, the Old Clam House sometimes disputes the Tadich Grill’s right to the title of oldest local restaurant. Certainly Tadich has gone by several names — the New World Coffee Stand, the New World Saloon, The Cold Day Restaurant among its aliases. And it has occupied no fewer than eight different locations.
But there’s been enough continuity to bolster the Tadich’s claim. It’s been owned and operated by Croatian-American families throughout. Its original waterfront location speaks loud and clear in the Grill’s ongoing love affair with seafood. And, though it’s bopped around some, it’s always chosen to locate near the heart of the city’s action — and to provide straightforward, tasty fare to San Francisco’s movers and shakers.
The moveable feast that was the Tadich finally settled down in its current financial-district location in 1967. But it feels like it’s been here forever — when it moved from nearby Clay Street, a designer did such a good job of mimicking the old deco-era fixtures that, after the first lunch in the new place, the regulars, reportedly, rose, as one, to applaud, some giving it that ultimate regulars’ accolade, “We’re back at home.”
The neon sign out front hints at what you’re likely to find within. Here the waiters wear white jackets and black slacks, with dark ties of their own choosing. An 80-foot long bar, perfect for solo meals, stretches the length of the place, while, for larger parties, there are wood-paneled booths, with curtains, stained-glass accents and old buttons to call for service — they don’t work any more.
The front page of the menu hits on highlights of Tadich Grill’s history from the Gold Rush on, when it first opened as a tent-covered coffee stand on what was then the waterfront. Once the Long Wharf, it is now, post-landfill, a long way from the bay side of the city. The menu blurb speaks of the Tadich behind the grill, one John Tadich, an immigrant from Croatia, who began working here in 1871 alongside his older countrymen, and, in 1887, bought what was, by then, a full food-and-drink providing establishment.
The logo on the menu and crockery has “The Original Cold Day Restaurant” printed below the Tadich Grill. Tourists visiting in the city’s often frigid summers might imagine this is to be attempt, through branding, to draw in those chilled by the thick fogs. But the name has a more specific origin story. One of the Grill’s early regulars was a vivid character with a vivid handle: Alexander Badlam Jr. The so-called Boisterous Badlam’s father was a rather pious Mormon elder who came to California with Samuel Brannan. (The more well-known Brannan married a Badlam and became rich selling supplies to miners in the Gold Rush, among many other things.)
As a young man, Badlam Jr. mined in Amador County, but back-breaking toil was not his thing. He became a state legislator and then the County of San Francisco’s assessor, a lucrative post in those relatively unscrupulous, booming times. He ran to get reelected to this office with the slogan, “It’ll Be a Cold Day Before I Leave.” That bit of presumption helped get him tossed, with voters unloading a carriage full of ice on his stoop for good measure; You want a cold day, we’ll give you a cold day.
He and his cronies retreated here — no doubt served sometimes by Tadich himself — and the restaurant became “The Cold Day.” For a time around the turn of the 20th century, Tadich partnered with another Croatian ex-pat, John Sutich. After the quake and resulting fire destroyed their place, Sutich struck out on his own, calling his new establishment The Cold Day. The cheek! A furious Tadich asserted his rights with the tagline “The Original Cold Day Restaurant,” one that remains years after Sutich’s upstart restaurant has gone the way of most restaurants into oblivion.
Another crowd of Croatians took over the place in the late 1920s, the Buich Brothers — Tom, Mitch and Louie, and their successors — still run the place nearly a full century, some four generations later. Louie gets credited with the Tadich’s main contribution to the American culinary scene: He supposedly began grilling fish and meats in the old Croatian style, over mesquite charcoal, and popularized that now common mode of cooking in the New World. (Tadich can go through as many as four 40-pound bags of charcoal a day, in catering to between 600 and 800 diners.)
The grill is one of the only restaurants named in longtime city columnist Herb Caen’s 1957 Guide to San Francisco that still operates, and the long bar returns the favor, by offering a martini named for him. It’s made with vodka, what Caen called Vitamin V.
The wine list leads with a chardonnay from Wente, one of California’s oldest wineries that’s also family-run. Generations of Wentes have known generations of Buichs, many of them becoming friends. For years, beer from the city’s longtime oldest brewery, Anchor, was on tap here.
These drinks can wash down solid renditions of San Francisco’s classic dishes — its seafood stew (Cioppino), its oyster-accented frittata (the Hangtown Fry), its crab salad (the Louie) and the local catches that dominate the menu (sand dabs, Petrale sole and Dungeness crab).
Its current owner Mike Buich started working here at age nine, peeling shrimp and bussing tables. In this future-oriented town, he once said: “There’s a novelty to tradition in today’s society.”
It’ll be a cold day, indeed, when the Tadich closes.
Alec Scott is an award-winning journalist, with features in The New York Times, Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, Los Angeles Times and Sunset.
Learn more about Oldest San Francisco, his latest book with stories of the institutions that helped make San Francisco the place it is today.
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