Louis’ Restaurant RIP. It was rumored last spring that it would reopen.
October 16, 2024 San Francisco SeniorBeat
It was, you might say, the last breakfast. On a summer Saturday in 2020, dozens of family members, employees, customers, and friends got together for one last meal at a restaurant that had survived under the ownership of a single family for more than 80 years.
Louis’ Restaurant, perched on a cliff above Sutro Baths on Point Lobos Avenue, was closing. It was a victim of the pandemic and the governor’s order to shutter restaurants throughout the state. Although you’d think it would have been a melancholy meal, it wasn’t.
Bill Hontales looks out toward the Pacific Ocean from a narrow balcony along the building that once housed Louis’ Restaurant. (Photo by Colin Campbell)
Tom Hontalas, who owned the popular eatery along with his older brother, Bill, was cooking the kinds of breakfasts generations of San Franciscans and tourists had come to enjoy, along with the iconic view of the Pacific Ocean: pancakes, sausage, bacon, and scrambled eggs. His wife, Patty, whose friendship with the Hontalas family started in grade school, was there to help.
A joyful ‘wake’
“There were no tears. It was a celebration. But it was strange knowing it was the last time we’d eat there and that there was, for once, plenty of parking,” she said. Generations of the family attended: brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.
Louis’ was the cement that held a family together for three generations. Over the decades, the 55-seat eatery provided jobs for uncounted platoons of workers, many drawn from the Sunset neighborhood where the Hontalas family lived. Running a restaurant is hard work, but it provided a solid living for the family at a time when working-class San Franciscans could own homes and start businesses.
Four years after Louis’ closed, there are no plans to revive it, the brothers who last ran it are thriving, but sadly, the building that housed it is a dilapidated graffiti magnet.
It opened on Valentine’s Day 1937, founded by Louis Hontalas, who had immigrated from Greece earlier that century. Ownership was passed down from Louis and his wife to his son James and then to his sons, Tom and Bill.
Three generations of a San Francisco family thrived running popular oceanside eatery overlooking Sut
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