From Gold Rush grub to craft patties — 170 years of beef
San Francisco has been a burger town since before anyone called them burgers. The Gold Rush brought hundreds of thousands of people through the city in the 1850s, and they all needed to eat fast and cheap. Street vendors grilled ground beef on makeshift grills along the waterfront. It wasn't fancy. It was sustenance for people in a hurry — which, when you think about it, is still what a good burger is today.
By Abraham Dababneh · April 2026
After World War II, car culture hit California hard, and San Francisco was no exception. Drive-in burger joints popped up everywhere. Mel's Drive-In opened in 1947 on South Van Ness and became the city's most famous — partly because of the food, mostly because George Lucas filmed American Graffiti there in 1972. The neon signs, the car hop service, the jukeboxes. It was a whole scene.
Beep's Burgers opened on Ocean Avenue in 1962, named after the beeping satellites of the Space Age. They're still there. Still serving the same basic burger. A place that survives 60+ years without rebranding is doing something fundamentally right — they found a formula and they stuck with it.
Fast food chains nearly killed the independent burger joint. McDonald's and Burger King could sell a burger for a dollar. How do you compete with a dollar? Most places couldn't. Drive-ins closed. Diners converted to other cuisines. By the early '90s, independent burger restaurants in San Francisco were endangered.
That's the world I walked into in 1997 when I opened Big Mouth Burgers on Cherry Ave in San Bruno. People told me I was crazy. Why would anyone pay $8 for a burger when McDonald's was selling them for 99 cents? My answer was simple: because mine's actually good. Humanely-raised beef, hand-cut fries, cooked over open flame. The people who tasted the difference became regulars, and they told their friends. We didn't need a marketing budget. We needed a good grill.
Something shifted around 2005. People started caring about where their food came from. "Organic," "grass-fed," "locally sourced" went from health-food buzzwords to mainstream expectations. Suddenly, the approach we'd been using since day one — quality ingredients, simple preparation, real cooking — wasn't just a niche thing. It was what everybody wanted.
Super Duper opened in 2010 with Brandt Beef and Straus ice cream. Roam launched their "pasture to plate" concept. Calibur brought the smash burger technique to the avenues. The Bay Area became one of the best burger scenes in America, and for once, the independent operators were winning against the chains.
Other cities have great burgers. New York has Shake Shack. LA has In-N-Out (we have it too, but still). Austin has Hopdoddy. But San Francisco's burger culture has something specific: the ingredient obsession.
In most cities, a "good burger" means it tastes good. In SF, a good burger means the beef is humanely raised, the bun is from a local bakery, the cheese is from a family creamery, and the cook can tell you the name of the ranch where the cattle grazed. We're ridiculous about it, and that's what makes our burgers better.
At Big Mouth, we've been this ridiculous since before it was fashionable. When I opened in 1997, nobody cared about "humanely raised" — they cared about taste. It just so happens that humanely raised beef tastes better. The market caught up to what Abraham already knew.
Plant-based options are getting better. Beyond Burger and Impossible are on menus everywhere, including ours. They're not going to replace beef — but they're giving people options, and that's fine. The fundamental thing about burgers hasn't changed in 170 years: ground meat, heat, bread. The details evolve. The principle doesn't.
Thirty years from now, people will still be lining up for burgers in San Francisco. I hope some of them are lining up at our place.