How to make an Irish Coffee just like the place that makes the world’s best- at The Buena Vista in San Francisco
“Buena Vista’s storied drink is easier than you think”
The following written content by Jason O’Bryan
On the Northeast corner of the peninsula, about a mile west from the noisy sea lions and narrative capitalism of Pier 39, is a San Francisco institution called The Buena Vista.
The Buena Vista is a restaurant. Been there forever. The inside is warm, old wood everything, cozy without being small and with fixtures so worn over their decades of service that their imperfections read as charm. It’s always packed, morning to night, and I’ll tell you now their popularity isn’t because of the food. Nor is it, despite their name, for the view—you can actually see a bit of the bay from the large windows that panel the bar’s northern wall, but the defining feature of the vista is the traffic on Beach St. And while you might catch a bartender in a good mood, the service is mostly that kind of brisk professionalism you experience in airports and tourist traps and every other place where they know they’ll always be busy no matter how they treat you.
No, the reason tourists and locals alike move through the Buena Vista like Macy’s at Christmas is the same reason the white sleeves of the bartenders are stained brown to the elbow: They have, for the last 70 or so years, served quickly and in great quantities what is widely understood as the best Irish Coffee in the world.
If you’ve not had the pleasure, I’d expect a small glimmer of skepticism to now be pulsing in the back of your brain. San Francisco always seems to be patting itself on the back for one thing or another, but the best Irish Coffee? Irish Coffees are easy. You yourself have probably made one that you thought was pretty great. This might have led you to believe that they can only get so good and that there’s really not much to it. You’d be wrong.
It is true that a good Irish Coffee is within reach to everyone, but it is also true that pushing the cocktail to be its best self involves a specific series of steps that, according to lore, were perfected by a bartender at Ireland’s Shannon International Airport and given to travel writer Stanton Delaplane, who came home to San Francisco to offer it to the Buena Vista in 1952.
The recipe is simple, as you’d imagine. The craziest thing about it is that the perfect Irish Coffee is almost entirely about technique. The ingredients really don’t matter that much. An Irish Coffee is: Coffee (obviously), Irish whiskey (again, obviously), sugar, and heavy cream. At the Buena Vista they use a local coffee wholesaler, Tullamore D.E.W. whiskey, with bleached white C&H sugar cubes and grocery store cream. There’s nothing exceptional about any of that, and yet, put together, the Buena Vista Irish Coffee is exceptional, the whole so much greater than the sum of its parts that they’re barely in the same zip code, all because of these three steps: Read more from Robb Report
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