What Ever Happened to San Francisco’s Cliff House Mystique?
It’s still there, if we take the time to see it.
For much of the 20th century, a visit to San Francisco’s Cliff House, perched above Ocean Beach and adjacent to the famed Sutro Baths was a litmus test for having truly seen San Francisco.
Decades older than the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges, the Cliff House restaurant and the “World’s Largest” gift shop served as San Francisco’s Westside magnets, luring residents and tourists alike to their cache of curios and ocean-view meals of crab, shrimp, abalone, quail, and the occasional grizzly bear steak.
Now, three years after the last iteration of the famous restaurant closed, a new, as yet unnamed, restaurant is poised to open.
Nostalgia buffs will likely complain that the “Cliff House” experience, which was always about more than menus and keepsakes, will never be the same. For them, what was once a destination full of quirky charm might now be an apparition, a seaside stopover with bracing ocean views but with little old-fashioned mystique.
After studying this photo of the Cliff House surroundings taken more than a century ago, you can understand these feelings.
