At the corner of Hyde and Beach streets, next to the Powell-Hyde cable car turnaround, bartenders at the Buena Vista line up rows of glass goblets every day and make them all the same way. The bar says it makes up to 2,000 Irish coffees on a busy day. It also says it was the first place in America to serve the drink.
Born in Ireland
The drink did not start in San Francisco. KQED's Bay Curious traced it to Joe Sheridan, a chef at the Foynes flying-boat terminal in Ireland, who was serving whiskey-laced coffee to chilled passengers in 1942 or 1943. The drink later followed transatlantic travel to the airport at Shannon.
A night of experiments
The Buena Vista's history picks up on Nov. 10, 1952. Owner Jack Koeppler took on a challenge from Stanton Delaplane, a San Francisco Chronicle travel writer who had tasted the drink at Shannon. They spent the night trying to recreate it. The flavor came easily, but the cream kept sinking.
Koeppler went to Shannon himself to study the original. Back home, the bar says the solution came with help from San Francisco's mayor, who owned a dairy: cream aged for 48 hours and then frothed to the right thickness will float on the coffee.
The pour today
Each drink is served in a six-ounce stemmed goblet, topped with a collar of the frothed cream. KQED reported the bar uses Tullamore Dew and serves about 2,000 a day, and around 2,500 on busy weekends. A staffer told KQED that the drink was "introduced first in San Francisco to America."
The bar is at 2765 Hyde St. It gets crowded with tourists in the afternoon, so locals tend to come early in the day or on a weeknight. The Hyde Street Pier and Aquatic Park are across the street.