The Buena Vista is a café in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, credited with introducing

Irish coffee Irish coffee ( ga, caife Gaelach) is a caffeinated alcoholic drink consisting of Irish whiskey, hot coffee and sugar, which has been stirred and topped with cream (sometimes cream liqueur). The coffee is drunk through the cream. Origin Different ...

to the United States in 1952. The Buena Vista Café originally opened in 1916 when the first floor of a boardinghouse was converted into a saloon. The current owners also operate the

Trident A trident is a three- pronged spear. It is used for spear fishing and historically as a polearm. The trident is the weapon of Poseidon, or Neptune, the God of the Sea in classical mythology. The trident may occasionally be held by other marine ...

Sausalito Sausalito (Spanish for "small willow grove") is a city in Marin County, California, United States, located southeast of Marin City, south-southeast of San Rafael, and about north of San Francisco from the Golden Gate Bridge. Sausalito's p ...

Irish coffee

Stanton Delaplane Stanton Hill ("Stan") Delaplane (12 October 1907 – 18 April 1988) was a travel writer, credited with introducing Irish coffee to the United States. Called "last of the old irreplaceables" by fellow-columnist Herb Caen, he worked for the ''San Fra ...

who was a travel writer for the ''

San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. de ...

'' drank an Irish coffee at the

Shannon Airport Shannon Airport ( ga, Aerfort na Sionainne) is an international airport located in County Clare in the Republic of Ireland. It is adjacent to the Shannon Estuary and lies halfway between Ennis and Limerick. The airport is the third busiest ai ...

while on a trip to Ireland. Some time later, Stanton Delaplane along with owner Jack Koeppler of the Buena Vista Café in San Francisco, California, tried to recreate this drink. Delaplane and Koeppler worked for hours mixing and sampling different versions of the drink until they achieved the results that they were looking for and almost passed out in the process. The two men solicited the advice of the mayor of San Francisco at that time since he was also a prominent dairy owner. The method for floating the cream on top of the coffee was suggested to them by Mayor,

George Christopher George Christopher (born George Christopheles; December 8, 1907 – September 14, 2000) was a Greek-American politician who served as the 34th mayor of San Francisco from 1956 to 1964. He is the most recent Republican to be elected mayor of San ...

, who told them that the cream should be aged at least 48 hours in order that it would be more apt to float atop the coffee. The Buena Vista Café began serving their Irish Coffee drink on November 10, 1952. Also, Stanton Delaplane helped to popularize the drink by mentioning it frequently in his travel column. The Buena Vista Café has served, by its count, more than 30 million drinks of their signature Irish Coffee.

References

External links

Buena Vista website
Drinking establishments in the San Francisco Bay Area Irish-American culture in California Restaurants in San Francisco 1916 establishments in California Restaurants established in 1916 {{SanFrancisco-struct-stub