Anyone can open a bar and call it a dive. But real dives have a dingy-cool patina that takes years to accrue, like the rings of a tree. It cannot be faked.
However, Lane Ford and Alvin Luna come close to defying that axiom with their week-old Hamburguesa Bar (opens in new tab). With its drop ceiling, faux-wood-paneled walls, kitschy art, and vintage beer signs, it’s welcoming and charmingly retro, like stumbling into a Midwestern grandfather’s basement.
Hamburguesa Bar is meant to be a hangout, driven by value as much as style. Serving a tight menu of burgers, poutine, duck-fat fries, it’s different from the proliferation of downtown’s soulless fast-casual eateries, where patrons order by QR code. “Kiosk places,” Ford calls them.
“We wanted a place where you can get a burger, fries, and a 16-ounce beer and be out the door for $23,” he says. “And the beer comes in a frosty mug, which nobody’s really doing anymore.”
Ford, who owns the SoMa pizzeria Pie Punks with Luna, is a New Orleans native who grew up in Oklahoma. He wanted to pay tribute to the kinds of places his father took him to, which are rapidly disappearing from the American foodscape. Taking over the space formerly occupied by the Mexican restaurant Caramba, Hamburguesa Bar is essentially a diner serving high-calorie comfort foods.
Notably, the menu divides burgers into two categories: thin, lacy smashburgers and charbroiled, 6-to 8-ounce patties that Ford calls “tavern burgers” (“I just like the way the word ‘tavern’ looks on a page,” he says.) Even the fanciest, a brisket patty with truffle butter, mushroom ragout, a demiglace, and white American cheese, tops out at $20.
The cocktail list is a rundown of classics, such as an old-fashioned, Manhattan, and daiquiri, plus the requisite espresso martini. Beers include IPAs from Bay Area breweries Ghost Town and Barebottle, plus good old Pabst Blue Ribbon. House red and white wines cost $10 each and are poured up to the brim in a 6-ounce glass.
The interior evokes a retro diner, with two old-school televisions. | Source: Astrid Kane/The Standard
No diner would be complete without shakes, and an entire program is forthcoming, with options ranging from vanilla and chocolate to Fruity Pebbles and cinnamon toast. Anyone with a sweet tooth should consider a slice of house-made rum cake with a scoop of ice cream.
There are visual cues that tie Hamburguesa Bar to the owners’ other spot, Pie Punks, which is located just a block down Second Street. They each have old-school, analog televisions whose grainy screens play old movies on mute, plus wall art of the painted-velvet thrift-store variety. But Hamburguesa Bar’s soundtrack comes via a 1960s tube amp that Ford sourced from a resident of the Excelsior.
In other words, this down-home, deliberately tacky place feels already lived in and loved — a fully formed dive in the making. Which is exactly what Ford had in mind. “Even if nobody likes what this is, it’s exactly what I imagined it to be,” he says.