noun · first recorded 1951 · status: og
Hofbrau
1.An old-SF cafeteria-saloon where a man with two knives carves a mountain of turkey onto sourdough while you hold a tray, and the mayor eats next to the plumber. Once dozens strong across the city; now basically Tommy's Joynt and everyone over sixty's favorite memory.
The founder suggested Tommy's Joynt for the offsite, and the new grad asked whether the hofbrau was pre-revenue.
01Origin
The San Francisco hofbrau has almost nothing to do with Germany. It fused the saloon's free-lunch tradition with the postwar cafeteria: full bar, steam table, and freshly carved roasts as the spectacle at the center of the line. Tommy Harris and Al Pollack formalized the genre at Tommy's Joynt (Van Ness and Geary, 1951), whose early menu ran to buffalo stew, bear soup, chocolate-covered baby bees, and 102 beers. Lefty O'Doul's followed near Union Square in 1958, and by the sixties the city held dozens: Breen's, The Main Stem, World Famous Freddie's, Max's, the Line Up. Metallica asked Jason Newsted to join the band at Tommy's in 1986, which is the most hofbrau sentence ever written.
The genre died of the healthy eighties, downtown rents, and its own clientele aging out; Lefty's lost its landlord fight in 2017, and a 2025 Mission pop-up revival served Nashville-hot Wienerschnitzel, which the originals would have found suspicious. Today the word works as a password for old San Francisco: say it correctly and a native will materialize to tell you about the carvers, the taxidermy, and where the piano bar was. It belongs to the same civic stratum as karl the fog, and it is the exact cultural opposite of monroes, where being seen is the entire menu.
02Notable sightings
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03Spread the ism
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