Until a couple of weeks ago, the space at 4248 18th Street was plating Patagonian steak and house-made dulce de leche. This month, it is smashing patties on a flat-top instead.
Flora King, the Argentinian steakhouse that opened in the Castro in March 2025, served its final dinner on June 28, the Sunday of Pride weekend. In a note posted in the window and shared online, owners Angela Pryor Garat and Ignacio Garat thanked the neighborhood for roughly 15 months of business and revealed what comes next: Iggy's Burgers, the family's own Sonoma County smashburger brand, now open in the same room.
If the name rings a bell, that is by design; the concept is staying in the family. Flora King was the parents' restaurant. Iggy's Burgers belongs to their son, Ignacio "Iggy" Garat, who opened the original Iggy's on the Healdsburg plaza in 2023 and a second location inside Sebastopol's Barlow market district last year. The Castro makes three.
So what lands on the plate? Up north, Iggy's built its following on organic, locally sourced beef cooked in beef tallow, finished with a "Million Island" sauce, pickled onions, and Clover cheddar on a soft Hawaiian-style bun. Sonoma Magazine has ranked the flagship "Iggy" among the best burgers in the county. The kitchen also runs thick-cut fries, onion rings, a fried chicken sandwich, and nuggets, plus fried chicken buckets at the Sebastopol outpost; the shakes come courtesy of the family's Angela's Organic Ice Cream, which grew out of Petaluma's Lala's Creamery back in 2017.
The burger obsession has roots. Garat was born in Argentina, and by his own telling his grandparents helped bring McDonald's to the country in the 1980s, which is where the fixation started. He has told the Marin Independent Journal that his family immigrated to the United States in 2001 and went into the restaurant business here.
For the Castro, the owners are promising grass-fed smash burgers, Angela's shakes, and a full bar, open daily from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., with a menu of burgers, chicken sandwiches, fries, and salads. The bar is still a work in progress: a license to pour beer, wine, and spirits is pending with the state, where Flora King had only ever been cleared for beer and wine. And the family is not done with 18th Street. A scoop of the operation is expanding down the block, with an Angela's Organic Ice Cream planned for the former 7-Eleven site nearby, as Hoodline reported. The brand already has a San Francisco toehold in Noe Valley.
Read the pivot however you like, but it looks a lot like a bet on affordability. The owners said they wanted "a welcoming, affordable place to gather every day of the week," according to the closure notice of Flora King on OpenTable. That notice also pointed out the offering of ice cream. (Something to update our ice cream map with.)
In a 2026 dining economy where even polished concepts fold within a year, a roughly $13 smashburger is a very different pitch than a white-tablecloth steakhouse.
The address has seen plenty of churn: Flora King followed the Italian restaurant Vico Cavone, which followed Firewood Cafe, a Castro mainstay that lasted 22 years before closing in 2019. Whether burgers and shakes prove stickier is the open question. We will report back once we have eaten our way through the menu.
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Saul Sugarman
