The Barstool Fund - Tadich Grill
Up next: Tadich Grill (San Francisco, CA)
Located in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, Tadich Grill is the oldest, continuously run restaurant in California, and third oldest in the United States.
Reader Email
Tadich Grill is the oldest restaurant West of the Mississippi and a significant part of San Francisco’s history. Over the past 171 years, Tadich’s loyal customers have witnessed our survival through wars, the Great Depression, market crashes, fires, and major earthquakes. The current forced closure (nearly 10 months and counting) due to the pandemic has proven to be the most devastating.
What has set us apart from many other white tablecloth restaurants is the retention of our employees – our “Tadich Family” – many who have been with us for over 20 years and have watched me and my sisters grow up (one bartender bought us pink SF Giants hats when we were 7, 9 and 10 years old and this year, gifted my newborn daughter and niece pink Giants hats of their own). In an industry where turnover is rampant, our customers have been greeted by the same faces for years. Our patrons have been a mixture of local business professionals grabbing a “power” meal, tourists who get an inside tip for the best seafood in “the City", or families gathering for dinner. Throughout this pandemic, we have been blessed to receive notes of encouragement from our customers sharing with us their stories of the Tadich traditions they have held for generations, with shoutouts to our staff, by name, who orchestrate those traditions.
On March 17th, we closed our doors for business under San Francisco mandates and we have been forced to remain closed since. Even for the short time period where outdoor dining was allowed (which is no longer the case), our sidewalk could only seat eight patrons which wouldn’t have been enough to even cover the costs. Not to mention, San Francisco’s financial district (where we’re located) resembles a ghost town after companies’ offices have been closed until mid-2021 and tourism has come to a halt, so there wasn’t even enough foot traffic to demand eight seats, as our next-door neighbor – another restaurant – found. Several SF “institutions” have closed permanently and we are hoping for a miracle to not be added to that list.
Despite our closure, we remained committed to our 30+ employees and their families, doing everything we could personally do. Our parents drained the restaurant’s savings and tapped into their own retirement savings to continue to pay our employees, cover their healthcare costs and pay our vendors for as long as they could afford (now, our mom – a retired nurse – has reentered the workforce as a frontline worker to help our local community and generate a paycheck to cover our parents' basic living expenses). We set up a GoFundMe account to raise money from our loyal customers and asked our networks to support us through gift card and merchandise sales. Utilizing these resources and a PPP loan, we were able to pay our employees and vendors through August. Unfortunately, we have run out of money from those temporary solutions and had to furlough our employees with the promise that we will bring back every single one of them when we’re able to re-open. Now, we need to focus on the viability of the restaurant to make sure there is a restaurant to bring them back to.
The city of San Francisco has not provided any relief and small businesses, especially restaurants, are being decimated. Even with doors shut, bills continue to accumulate. What’s more – our deep freezer went out losing tens of thousands of dollars of frozen inventory. Our goal is to continue to stay afloat until we are allowed to re-open with at least 50% capacity (a threshold that can hopefully allow us to breakeven while providing jobs to our employees). We are in desperate need of your help to hang on - for our employees, for our customers and for our historical significance in San Francisco.
Please help us make it to 172 years.