The Great American Saloon Series / Hoffman's of San Francisco
Bartholomew, Douglas
of the dangers posed by "Western imperialism." In a typical essay, Fedorchuk suggested that "ruling circles [in the West] have adopted a course of confrontation with the Soviet Union," whose...
...The balcony, incidentally, is at its finest in midafternoon, when you can secure a window table, a pair of d r a f t Buds, and kill time while the world outside swirls incessantly beneath your gaze...
...There are two kinds of people I d o n ' t want to o f f e n d , " he says, "Tax men and reporters...
...Most of our help has been here for at least ten years...
...He wrote a book on how to run a saloon, had his own pub, and now presides over Hoffman regulars and newcomers alike much as a Daddy watching his brood...
...As Betz and I finish lunch, his secretary appears at our table...
...Although most of Hoffman's trade consists of catering to the r e g u l a r crowd of bankers and other business types who toil in the financial district by day, the bar draws an occasional t o u r i s t or two...
...I t is 5 o'clock on a Friday...
...Fedorchuk's record does not augur well for Soviet human rights advocates, for activists in the national movements, and for independent trade unionists...
...Sullivan conducted business a f t e r the '06 rocker in a privy-size shed outside the wrecked tavern...
...But Fedorchuk is not content to blame only Western subversion for the internal difficulties the USSR faces: He prefers to implicate political dissidents in non-political crimes...
...Should they return, I will have Bill lace their drinks with curare doubles...
...Though I have never understood or enjoyed this game, I am wont to describe it...
...One in p a r t i c u l a r stands out...
...While he is not one to be pushed about, there is more than an ounce of 80-proof Helmut Schmidt diplomacy in his veins...
...And will survive, so long as Betz has anything to say about it...
...Along with a few of my cellmates from one of the glass monoliths nearby, I have come here to unwind after a blistering week with the typewriter, the telephone, and office politics...
...He lights customers' cigarettes and has been known to set up my beer before I'm through the door...
...Hoffman's founder was a man named Sullivan who came out here from New York in the 1890s to fashion a saloon after the Hoffman House in New York...
...Hoffman's size is deceptive...
...But not at the Hoffman Grill...
...Hoffman's is the kind of place where, after coming here for an evening, you can go home to your wife and tell her where you were...
...For these attributes he won the San Francisco Bartender of the Year award in 1980...
...The second attractive piece of canvas, adorning the opposite wall (Hoffman's ceilings are high enough to punt a football), is Domenic Tojetti's "Lily Maid of Astrolat," a reclining maiden on a floating bier, poled before a turreted castle as knights weep along the shore...
...I have a feeling we are never going to see another place like this, once it is gone...
...His name is Scan Mooney, and he is as Irish as a leprechaun with an Imperial quart of Jameson's--and just as sprightly...
...Hoffman's is closed after ten week-nights and all day on weekends...
...A good bottle of schnapps would have been a better deal, Bill...
...Nearly large as life, a full-breasted beauty reclines languorously amidst an aquamarine setting...
...We are seated at the prime table in the house, facing the window just off the bar on the first floor...
...The pub is a hideout, a refuge, a place where, midst the pandering and the sleaze and the meat markets (in a city where an uncontrollable urge for Twinkles is said to have murdered the Mayor, once a Hoffman's regular), a man can retreat for an hour or two of relative solace, sensible conversation, and good drink...
...For one thing, the booze is reasonably priced, if not downright cheap, in a city where some of the better hotel bars will hit you up for $3 for a Bass Ale...
...It is as if, with its magnificent paintings, heady draft beer, and grand mirrors, this saloon existed merely for that purpose...
...And physician Mykola Plakhotniuk, who spent nearly a decade in a psychiatric prison, recently was rearrested on a charge of homosexuality--a crime under the Soviet criminal code...
...When you say Hoffman's, she knows you had a couple of drinks, and that you w e r e n ' t at a meat market...
...Considering that this is a gentleman's saloon, and that neither I nor any of my associates weighs 300 pounds or is built like Primo Camera, we ease into the crowd and avoid its heavy, d o u b l e - b a r r e l e d stares...
...I can get drunk h e r e without spending fifty bucks, something you can't do at most bars in this city...
...0 1 There 1 _9 LI C ~L~o D Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...Although Bill is built like a Detroit Lions offensive lineman, he is much friendlier...
...at Hoffman's you get what you pay for, and then some...
...These consist of breaded fried zucchini, fried potato cakes, and meatballs or hot dogs in sauce...
...The effect is alluring...
...In liar's dice as in regular poker, a player can roll his dice, cover his hand, make a bid, and, by bluffing, win the other p l a y e r ' s money or a drink or whatever...
...Hoffman's sports numerous testimonials to its longevity as Baghdadby-the-Bay's oldest continuously operating saloon...
...HOFFMAN'S OF SAN FRANCISCO by Douglas Bartholomew l C Whit e ~ , v [ meat only 25 cents e x t r a , " the menu admonishes...
...Hoffman's is a solid mass of pinstriped men and suited women...
...There is nothing plastic here...
...In a typical essay, Fedorchuk suggested that "ruling circles [in the West] have adopted a course of confrontation with the Soviet Union," whose aim "is to restore capitalism in the socialist countries or to weaken them so much that they would be unable to resist the aggression of imperialism...
...I want tc keep Hoffman's the way it is...
...We spend a lot of money to maintain what we have...
...This masterwork was brought 'round Cape Horn in the days when vessels were vessels and travel still held forth true delights...
...On this p a r t i c u l a r Friday, as my colleagues and I attempt to quaff a few beers, we are beset by t h r e e obnoxious out-oftowners...
...Of the more than two Douglas Bartholomew is The American Spectator's Chief Saloon Corre spondent...
...At half the saloons in San Francisco, this message could well be taken as a sign of something deeper, a sexual palimpsest, perhaps...
...And many do, for few good taverns in the Bay Area can hold a Jack Daniels to Hoffman's when it comes to ease of drinking, A sense of camaraderie prevails...
...Started in the restaurant business as a waiter in New York...
...Their amiability in close quarters can only be matched by that of a trio of dobermans unleashed in a prison yard...
...He is having iced tea and scallops...
...It seems a developer who sought to replace the bar with a high-rise-"skyrise," Betz calls it--office tower had to agree to rebuild the bar in all its post-earthquake glory within the modern office building The deal, per Joe's meticulous requirements, has been set...
...I am thinking to myself, that's great if your wife doesn't mind your walking in the door with the breath of a draft horse, but what about the rest of us...
...Aside from Victorian .cheesecake and weeping knights, one can revel in the elaborately carved woodwork behind the bar, an ink portrait of Lin.coin, the original ceiling fans, the Tiffany vases that light the upper back bar, and, most stunning of all, the century-old, 40-foot bar...
...I am lunching with Betz today...
...Also present is that most elusive of all good drinking characteristics, a sense of genuine place...
...Some 300 to 400 lunches are served daily...
...Each player has a set of five dice to shake in the cup and roll on the bar...
...The prize was a trip to the Super Bowl, which enabled him to witness, if memory serves me, a lackluster contest between Philadelphia and Oakland...
...She says the state tax auditor is waiting for him in the office...
...Says a crusty old regular, "This is a real bar with real people...
...1 " &his isn't a tourist place," Betz reassures me...
...Located at Montgomery and Market Streets, the busiest intersection in San Francisco, Hoffman's is both oasis and retreat...
...Every mirror, painting, ceiling fan, waiter, bar28 THE AMERtCAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 tender, and maitre d' will be in place, just as before...
...He gets up to leave...
...They are packed three-deep and standing in the five feet of space between the bar and a brass rail protecting the dining tables...
...22 years ago...
...Thus, Ukrainian journalist and prison camp veteran Vyacheslav Chornovil was arrested on trumped-up charges of attempted rape...
...Bloomington, Indiana THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 29...
...I have the London broil...
...We are waiting now for our 100th year...
...He later relocated the bar a few doors away from its birthplace...
...Founded in 1891, the original Hoffman's stood at Market and Second Streets...
...These semicretins, one of whom in both height and personality resembles a barber's pole, begin squeezing us from our elbow's width of real estate at the bar...
...In the next year or so, Hoffman's will be torn down and later reconstructed on the same piece of ground it now occupies...
...For b e e r drinkers, there are Heineken's light or dark, Beck's (l'm learning to like it), Bud on tap for a dollar, Miller and Miller Lite, and Coors (not as good as Easterners are led to believe...
...Outside its swinging doors lurk all manner of street hawkers, flower vendors, occasional tourists, hookers seeking occasional tourists, sidewalk musicians, bums, assorted crazed souls, and lesser derelicts (the latest in West Coast bumology, I have learned firsthand, a distinction separating the professional bum from the mere derelict, is the line, "Got any Federal Reserve notes...
...One of the g r e a t e s t pastimes of Hoffman patrons--or of customers at almost any good San Francisco saloon - - i s what is locally known as l i a r ' s dice or liar's poker...
...We cater to the local trade, our repeat customers...
...The new hangman is now in a position to make his unique contribution to the Soviet variant of the "end of ideology' '--by imprisoning anyone who openly opposes the Party line...
...The food is American, the portions hearty...
...The only pleasures of the flesh you're likely to encounter here are those that arrive on a platter: turkey, veal, corned beef hash, chicken livers sautes, stuffed filet of pork, and a superb London broil...
...In this regard he is a wild card in the post-Brezhnev, high-stakes struggle for succession...
...The house liquor is all premium, and Betz touts his bartenders as having "the heaviest hands in t o w n . " No premeasured shots from a tube here...
...Waiter won't get you a beer...
...Came to the U.S...
...The latter enables male and female patrons to view one another without appearing to do so...
...He demonstrated this not long ago by refusing to let his dreams be felled by the everencroaching chainsaw of progress...
...As far as Hoffman's is conc e r n e d , " Betz says, " I d o n ' t want any changes...
...His name is Bill...
...First floor is a misnomer of s o r t s , since most of the saloon is ground level, save for a balcony with a dozen tables overlooking both the bar and dining area and the s t r e e t below...
...Got a job waiting tables at Hoffo man's...
...Speaking of maitres d', Hoffman's is noteworthy...
...The bartenders are efficient and courteous, and have no difficulty spotting you standing in the third row back...
...Betz tells me, with great pride, that while other classic saloons of old San Francisco have been either bought out or torn down and replaced with newer, more modern establishments, Hoffman's--like the House of Shields on New Montgomery--has survived...
...Hoffman's, no doubt, ranks as an oddity in this pulchritudinous, slitskirted city by the bay...
...The players, usually two men or (preferably) a man and a woman, obtain from the bartender a pair of leather...
...And in an article which appeared in October 1981 in the Ukrainian-language journal Under the Banner of Leninism, Fedorchuk expressed what even by Soviet standards is extreme hostility toward the West: "The forces of international reaction," he argued, "are actively exploiting their ideology of inculcating their citizens in a spirit of militarism, anti-Communism, and anti-Sovietism in order to create an atmosphere of mass psychosis, in this way destroying any possibility for domestic social protest...
...sided cups...
...After a few years, alighted in San Francisco...
...There are still o t h e r reasons for Hoffman's allure...
...Last year Mooney had a triplebypass and came out working the Hoffman tiles s t r o n g e r than ever...
...The effect is, guaranteed to fix the male drinker's headlights at a constant 45 degrees...
...dozen paintings hung about the walls here, most date from the last century, and two are from the 1500s...
...Comrade Fedorchuk emerges as well as a new factor within the highest ranks of the Soviet leadership...
...The tavern can seat 125 for lunch or dinner, besides handling the overflow of drinking patrons at the bar--usually 50 to 100 in the evening a f t e r five...
...Liar's dice is just passing time," says Betz, "to see who buys for the drink...
...The story of Joe Betz, I am learning, is a classic immigrant-madegood tale...
...When the owners, two brothers, sought a buyer in 1968, jumped at the chance to own the tavern...
...Mooney will get it for you if he has to draw it from the tap himself...
...Strongjawed and fair-haired, Betz is a Teutonic figure possessing a thick German accent, chartreuse eyes, and the posture of a California redwood...
...First and foremost is a Victorian oil high above the back bar...
...In particular, he has recently exhibited a penchant for discrediting political dissenters by framing them on charges of sexual deviation...
...Hoffman's is owned and operated by a man named Joe Betz...
...Between 5 and 6 p.m., the waitress serves hors d'oeuvres to the crowd at the bar...
...Hoffman's makes itself all the more comforting by its intricate blue-and-white Italian ceramic-tiled floor and its lavish mirroring over the back bar...
...The mirror, in fact, tends to tell all, from the facial expressions of the buxom blonde at the far end to the petulant countenance of the solitary brunette two seats to my left (is the redhead looking...
...This is not a pick-up joint...
...Escaping this miasma of desultory humanity and entering into Hoffman's is akin to departing from a dark and fetid tunnel into daylight with a rainbowed heaven above...
Vol. 15 • August 1982 • No. 8
