In recent weeks, customers have lined up for hours, even longer than the usual wait, for a table at Pacific Café in San Francisco, hoping for one last bite of crab-stuffed petrale sole and a final complimentary pour of wine before the Richmond District mainstay closed.
Co-owners Frank Gundry and Ross Warren recently announced that Sunday, Aug. 30, will be their last day of service, after putting the restaurant up for sale for $195,000 this spring so they can retire. At least one potential buyer is interested in preserving the business as Pacific Café, said Gundry, who started as a waiter soon after it opened in 1974 and became co-owner in 2014. But Gundry, 78, and Warren, 80, aren’t willing to wait for negotiations to go through to retire — nor are longtime staff members, host Roy Manabat, 80, and cooks Jian Huang and Roger Li, who are both in their late 60s, Gundry said. Without a buyer in place, the future of the restaurant as regulars know it remains unclear.
“We’ve been so busy and swamped you hardly have time to get your bearings,” Gundry said. “We didn’t realize how popular we were.”
Known more to locals than tourists, the 52-year-old restaurant at 7000 Geary Blvd. is a place where old-school seafood dishes like Parmesan-crusted halibut and salad tossed in shrimp Louie dressing have been on the menu almost from the beginning, always served with plentiful baskets of sourdough. Nostalgic food and enduring traditions, like its famous free wine for people waiting for a table, are a large part of Pacific Café’s appeal.
Jim Toby, a customer of 20 years, visited the restaurant twice in the past 10 days. “We waited two hours and enjoyed every minute in line,” he wrote in an email to the Chronicle. “Everyone cheered when a name was called to let them know their table was ready.”
The restaurant still brings in annual revenue of $1 million, according to its real estate listing. But Gundry has grandchildren on the East Coast he wants to visit more often, and working at the restaurant from 3:30 p.m. until it closes has become tiring. Warren works during the day, ordering ingredients, doing bookkeeping and preparing food. Manabat, who was a cook before becoming host, has clocked in over 40 years at the restaurant. Gundry said that Manabat, Huang and Li are “treasured and extremely well respected in our little community.” They’re also ready to retire, he said, “especially after the marathons” of dinner service during the last few months.
Tom Hawker and Jim Thomson opened Pacific Café in July 1974 and soon began its tradition of providing free glasses of house white wine to those waiting for a table on its windy corner of Geary Boulevard and 34th Avenue. The crowds haven’t thinned in the decades since. In a 1992 review, former Chronicle restaurant critic Tom Sietsema described a familiar scene: “Within minutes of unlocking its doors at 5 o’clock one recent Sunday, the 50-seat Pacific Café was filled and the queue began,” he wrote. The restaurant’s decor, including coral walls and amber lighting, is also “exactly the same as when we opened in ’74,” Gundry said. Wooden partitions in the waiting area still keep the unseated crowds from spilling into the dining room.
Many customers have come in recently asking Gundry if he recalls a parent who used to come in as a young person in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes sharing a photo of a relative who has passed away to prompt his memory. “It’s a real family operation,” he said. “People feel that way about us, and we’ve certainly told them we feel the same about them.”
But, Gundry said, “it’s time for us to hang up our aprons.”
Dining and Cooking