A popular San Francisco breakfast joint that served as inspiration for the Belcher family restaurant in “Bob’s Burgers” has permanently closed after more than 40 years in operation.
Just For You Café in the Dogpatch shuttered on Monday due to mounting debt incurred during the pandemic, rising inflation rates and other challenges related to the building it was operating out of, owner Reid Hannula told SFGATE.
“The long and short of it is that we really haven’t been making money since COVID, and it’s just been kind of a battle,” he said over the phone Wednesday morning. “I used a disaster loan to float us, personal money to float us. The restaurant, I love the restaurant, but it hadn’t been able to pay me for the last two years.”
The greasy spoon known for its fluffy beignets and made-from-scratch baked goods opened in 1980 as Mabel’s Just For You Café on 18th Street in Potrero Hill. The modest space with just two tables outside and eight stools at the counter later became the casual French restaurant Chez Maman. Arienne Landry bought the restaurant from the original owners in 1990 and dropped “Mabel’s” from the name. In 2002, she moved the business to the Dogpatch, long before it was considered a hip neighborhood. Landry, a Louisiana native, added “a southern edge” to the menu, Hannula said, as she introduced dishes like jambalaya, Creole crab cakes and gumbo.
The exterior of Just For You Café.
Thelma H./YelpHannula, who had been working at the restaurant since 2011, took over in 2018 when Landry retired and moved back to the South.
“The first year was fantastic,” he said. “Then everything went downhill from there.”
That November, smoke from the Camp Fire choked the city with thick, sooty air and killed business during what had normally been a peak season for the cafe. The following year, a seismic retrofit required by the city resulted in “a trench” in front of the restaurant, Hannula said. “People had to literally walk a plank to get into the building, and our sales dropped by almost half.”
By January 2020, the restaurant was finally starting to recover. “And then when COVID hit, everything stopped,” Hannula said. The cafe pivoted to a takeout-only business model with just four employees: Hannula and his now 27-year-old son, Zeke, plus two cooks. At one point during the pandemic, this skeleton crew worked for 76 days in a row in an effort to keep the business going. Eventually, the restaurant received a PPP loan and a disaster loan from the Small Business Administration, which helped, and Hannula was able to bring the rest of the staff back.
But soaring costs continued to make it difficult to stay open.
“They started changing overnight, it seemed like,” Hannula said. “We went through three price changes on our menu trying to adjust, and the thing we served the most of — eggs — tripled in price. We tried all kinds of things, but we were just bleeding money.”
Landry came back to San Francisco to try to find someone new to take over the restaurant, but it didn’t work out, she told Tablehopper. “The business climate is atrocious,” she said.
Last month, Hannula said he started to call up all 15 members of his staff individually. He had enough money to keep the restaurant going for another couple of weeks, but that was it. “It was rough on Monday,” Hannula said. “We reminisced on all these stories, had a good cry. It’s sad, but people are positive and resilient.”
Over the years, Just For You Café has served a steady clientele of UCSF nurses, tech workers, artists and families, with some customers coming in twice a day. The late City Lights founder and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a regular, and when Paul Rudd was filming “Ant-Man,” the actor would frequently come down and eat dinner right before closing time while no customers were there, Hannula said. Drew Barrymore and Tracy Chapman also stopped in for a bite, and the restaurant has been immortalized in one of the most popular animated comedy series on TV: “Bob’s Burgers.”
When creator Loren Bouchard and writer Nora Smith were developing the show in the mid-aughts, they tapped local artists Jay Howell and Sirron Norris to bring the Belcher family and the fictional Seymour’s Bay to life. During that time, Bouchard was taking pictures of restaurants all over San Francisco for inspiration, but nothing quite clicked until he stopped by Just For You Café.
“I looked in the window and saw something big,” he told SFGATE last year. “Like, bolt of lightning big.”
It was the pass-through between the kitchen and the front counter where customers place their orders, which he likened to “a children’s puppet theater.”
“You can basically see it as its own little stage,” Bouchard continued. He asked Norris to draw an interior modeled after Just For You so they could stage scenes in which Bob could banter with his family while at the grill.
On Just For You’s last day in business, neighbors quickly caught wind of the closure. They poured into the restaurant to buy out all of its remaining T-shirts and sweatshirts and were “buying beignets off the street,” Hannula said.
He’s not certain what the future of the space will be, but everything aside from the artwork, including all of the kitchen equipment and furnishings, remains intact.
“I’m hoping somebody can move in and start a restaurant as soon as possible,” Hannula said. “Just For You was one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life, and I want to thank everyone who supported us.”
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SF restaurant that became blueprint for 'Bob's Burgers' closes - SFGATE
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