How Irish Coffee Came to America Through the Buena Vista

Irish coffee was invented in Ireland, but it became famous in San Francisco, and the room where that happened is still pouring it at the corner of Beach and Hyde.

Shannon Airport, 1940s

The drink itself was created by Joe Sheridan, a chef at the flying-boat terminal at Foynes and later at Shannon Airport, who started topping whiskey-spiked coffee with cream for cold, weary transatlantic passengers in the 1940s. Travelers passing through Shannon talked about it, and one of them was Stanton Delaplane, the Pulitzer Prize-winning travel columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

November 10, 1952

By the Buena Vista’s own telling, on the night of November 10, 1952, Delaplane and Jack Koeppler, the bar’s owner, set out to recreate the Shannon Airport drink at the bar. They worked at it through the night and kept failing on two fronts: the taste wasn’t right, and the cream sank instead of floating.

Koeppler eventually flew to Ireland to taste the original. The cream problem went to George Christopher, who ran one of the city’s prominent dairies and later became mayor of San Francisco. His advice: age the cream about 48 hours and froth it lightly, so it pours thick enough to sit on the coffee instead of sinking through it. The whiskey question settled on a blended Irish style suited to the drink. With those pieces in place, the Buena Vista had its formula, and Delaplane’s column carried the story to a national audience.

The Production Line

The Buena Vista has been making the drink the same way since: a heated stemmed glass, two sugar cubes, hot coffee, Irish whiskey, and the aged, lightly whipped cream floated over the back of a spoon. Bartenders line up dozens of glasses and build them in batches; the bar reports serving up to 2,000 Irish coffees on a busy day and has claimed more Irish whiskey poured than any other single account in the country, a figure best treated as the bar’s own.

The building has its own history: the Buena Vista has operated at the corner since 1916, in a structure that began as a boardinghouse, and the windows look across Beach Street to the Hyde Street cable car turnaround and Aquatic Park.

Going Today

The Buena Vista opens in the morning and the Irish coffee works at any hour; breakfast with one is a San Francisco ritual. Expect a wait for tables on weekends. It sits at the western end of Fisherman’s Wharf, a block from Ghirardelli Square, and the Powell-Hyde cable car line ends across the street, which makes it the natural last stop after the ride.