In 1927 Morris and Charlotte Nathan opened Charlotte’s Tavern at 529 Powell Street in San Francisco — a location at the foot of Nob Hill, a hundred steps above Sutter Street, in the thick of the city’s tourist-hotel district. The St. Francis was two blocks down at Union Square, cable cars ran right past the door from early in the morning until late at night, and rising at the corner of Powell and Sutter was a $5 million, 21-story tower that would open in October 1928 as the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Every hotel in the neighborhood kept a dining room, and every dining room served hotel food. The Nathans reasoned that travelers marooned amid all that upholstered grandeur would pay for the one thing the grand kitchens could not convincingly produce: a home-cooked meal.
The Nathans were no newcomers to the trade. By the mid-1930s they would be described as prominent and successful restaurant operators of long standing, and Charlotte’s Tavern was at least the third place they had established within a two-block radius of Union Square. They were partners in the business, but Charlotte’s name was on the sign, and Charlotte’s cooking was the draw.
While the Nathans may have picked the perfect location, their timing was, as things turned out, anything but perfect. The first warning signs of the Great Depression came in mid-1929, and in October of that year came the stock market crash that would be known as Black Tuesday. Between 1929 and 1933, the United States suffered the steepest economic collapse in its modern history, with mass bank failures and skyrocketing unemployment.
The Depression decimated San Francisco’s tourist trade, and at the end of February 1933, with newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt just days away from declaring a national bank holiday, the Nathans got out. The sign on the front of the restaurant, however, stayed up under its new owners, Johan Herbert Franklin and Arlie Mary Franklin.
At the time, few men in San Francisco had fed more people than J. Herbert Franklin. In 1917 he and a partner, H. B. West, had founded Forest Lodge at Greenville, in the Feather River country of Plumas County; he sold his interest to West in 1920. In between came World War I, during which Franklin served as chief commissary steward aboard the U.S.S. Koningin der Nederlanden, a Dutch passenger liner seized by customs officials at San Francisco in March 1918 under executive order, commissioned into the U.S. Navy that April, and converted into a troop transport. The ship carried more than 2,000 soldiers per crossing to France in the closing months of the war, then spent 1919 hauling more than 10,000 of them home again. Back ashore in 1920, Franklin opened the Matson Navigation Company’s cafeteria at Pier 30 in San Francisco and managed it for six years — an operation run at cost rather than for profit, feeding the crews of every Matson ship tied up in port. By 1925 it was serving nine out of ten men on the Matson piers and had passed the half-million-meal mark, and in 1926 the line promoted Franklin to assistant port steward. He later put in a stretch as storekeeper at the Fairmont Hotel, and by 1930 he was back in the resort business, operating Summerhome Park, a vacation community on the south side of the Russian River near Forestville, California, renaming its hotel Franklin Tavern.
He never quite left the old troopship behind. In 1932 — the same year the Koningin der Nederlanden went to the scrappers — Franklin and a fellow crewman, Harry Zemansky of the White House department store, set out to reassemble the several hundred men who had sailed her during the war. The reunion took the form of a banquet at the States Hof Bräu Restaurant at the corner of Market and Eddy Streets. A year later, Franklin and his wife were running Charlotte’s.
When Martha Lane of the San Francisco News called at 529 Powell for her “Eating Around San Francisco” column in 1933, about six months into the new regime, she found the Franklins holding fast to the Nathans’ original concept and planning to deepen it by working old Spanish touches into the rooms — aiming, as she put it, at “true California atmosphere with California hospitality.” What struck her most was the quiet. The dining room was low and bungalow-like, simply furnished, lit by candles rather than glaring daylight or electric fixtures, free of noise and glamor — a deliberate relief, she wrote, from other establishments in the neighborhood. Just inside the door stood the tavern’s totem: a huge candlestick shaggy with stalactites of dripped, multicolored wax. This was the Wishing Candle. Diners wedged pennies into the warm wax — the house legend held that anyone who buried a penny there and made a wish was sure to have it granted — and the mass of coins and wax grew a little larger every day.
The operation behind the candlelight was substantial. The tavern seated about 100 and served an average of 300 meals a day with a staff of 22. Arlie Franklin worked the floor as hostess; her husband did the buying himself, going down to the markets every morning to pick over the seasonal produce — a routine his years provisioning ships and hotels had made second nature. Hours ran from 11 in the morning to 8 at night, except Sundays, when only dinner was served, from 4 to 8. The restaurant also hosted private parties in the dining room and offered to prepare and serve lunches, dinners, picnic spreads, and barbecues anywhere a customer might choose. Diners perusing the midday menu could choose from four tiers — a popular luncheon, a special luncheon, a beer luncheon, and a sandwich luncheon — priced, in the house’s phrase, as low as the quality of the food would allow.
Arlie Franklin’s reputation traveled beyond her own dining room that year: When the San Francisco News ran a menu-planning contest that offered housewives pin money for their best efforts, she was named the final judge, on the strength of her wide knowledge of what to serve, and when, and how.
That fall the tavern advertised a Thanksgiving dinner for just $1.00, with a parenthetical that captured the national moment precisely: “Wines when legal.” Thanksgiving fell on November 30 in 1933. The long-awaited repeal of Prohibition arrived five days later.
Retirement, meanwhile, had not agreed with Morris and Charlotte Nathan. They had set off on a leisurely tour after selling the tavern, and the rest cure promptly turned into a working study of notable restaurants across the United States and beyond the border. In 1934 they leased a one-story building at 272 Sutter Street, two blocks from Charlotte’s Tavern, and immediately set about turning the premises into a high-class restaurant called, this time, Nathan’s. Morris claimed one more distinction on the way in: the credit for filing the first application in San Francisco for an “on sale” liquor license after repeal.
In 1937 Charlotte’s Tavern was in the news for a reason no restaurateur wants. Early one morning, Charles Schemann, a baker at the restaurant, arrived for work to find the rear door jimmied. Safecrackers had dragged a small safe from the front of the restaurant to the rear, wrapped it in clothes to deaden the explosion, and blown it open, escaping with more than $400 in weekend receipts from what a wire report called “one of San Francisco’s better-known restaurants.” A news photograph showed Franklin looking at the wrecked safe and a police officer looking at the camera. The burglars had missed the best of the haul: a signed check for $855 tucked away in a corner of the safe.
The Spanish plan sketched out in 1933 had by then hardened into the house identity. Advertising in 1937 pitched “Charlotte’s Fine Food — Early California Restaurant,” with lunches at 30 to 60 cents and dinners at 50 to 85 cents.
Franklin’s reach still extended well beyond Powell Street. In June 1938 the new Rotary Club at Greenville — the Plumas County town where he had founded Forest Lodge two decades before — engaged him to prepare the dinner for its charter night on June 29, a sit-down for members and 300 guests, with his chef Henry Conte in charge of the kitchen.
That December the Wishing Candle gave up its hoard. Six hundred pennies, pried from a decade of wax, went from Charlotte’s Tavern to the San Francisco Examiner’s Christmas Cheer Fund, which was piling toys and food into a warehouse for the city’s poor. The fund’s columnist, running down the day’s gifts, paused over this one: 600 wishes, the paper reflected, could not have been directed to a better cause, and would be fulfilled. The ledger line read simply: “Charlotte’s: The Wishing Candle, $6.00.”
It was close to a last act. Easter Sunday 1939 brought a 75-cent holiday dinner at Charlotte’s Tavern, served noon to 8:30. But within a year the restaurant had fallen into bankruptcy, and on March 7, 1940, at 2 p.m., auctioneer Jerrold H. Baer raised his gavel at 529 Powell Street to begin selling everything on the premises.
The address did not stay dark long. Later that year, a Hungarian restaurant named Old Budapest opened there, serving chicken paprikás, goulash, and strudel in the rooms where the Wishing Candle had collected its pennies. Right below the new name in newspaper ads were the two words the owners had every reason to believe would bring diners in the door: “Formerly Charlotte’s.”
Baby Tomato Salad
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Loading...This simple composed salad was a favorite at Charlotte’s Tavern, a candlelit, home-cooking restaurant that operated at 529 Powell Street in San Francisco from 1927 to 1940. Halved red and yellow plum tomatoes, arranged like the spokes of a wheel over a bed of lettuce, make the most of peak-season fruit; the only flourish is a French dressing bolstered with finely chopped fresh cucumber, which adds crunch and keeps the plate cool.
Ingredients
- 1 cup French dressing, homemade or store-bought (see note)
- 1 small cucumber, peeled, seeded and finely chopped (about 1 cup)
- 1 small head butter or iceberg lettuce
- 8 ripe red plum tomatoes
- 8 ripe yellow plum tomatoes
Instructions
In a small bowl, stir the chopped cucumber into the French dressing and set aside for at least 10 minutes so the flavors come together; the dressing should be thick with cucumber.
Separate 4 large, unblemished outer leaves from the lettuce and place one flat on each of 4 salad plates. Shred enough of the remaining lettuce to make about 2 cups and mound it lightly in the center of each leaf.
Halve the red and yellow tomatoes lengthwise. On each plate, arrange 4 red halves and 4 yellow halves over the shredded lettuce in spoke fashion, alternating the colors, cut sides up.
Stir the dressing once more, taste and adjust the seasoning, then spoon it generously over each salad, making sure every serving gets plenty of cucumber. Serve at once.
Notes
In the early 1930s, when this salad was served at Charlotte's Tavern, "French dressing" meant a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing, not the sweet bottled kind sold in supermarkets today.
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