John’s Grill, the Downtown San Francisco restaurant celebrating its 115th anniversary Wednesday, leans a lot on its long and storied history.
The restaurant has many claims to fame: notable customers from Ronald Reagan to Renee Zellweger, a champagne dressing that became its own brand and the longtime patronage of fitness guru Jack LaLanne, who ate there so often they named a salad after him (seasonal greens with crab, shrimp, avocado, mushrooms and tomato with blue cheese vinaigrette).
But above them all looms the legacy of Dashiell Hammett, the hard-boiled detective writer who immortalized the restaurant in his 1927 novel The Maltese Falcon, a story that became the 1941 film noir classic starring Humphrey Bogart.
Hammett mentions the restaurant by name in a scene from his famous novel in which detective Sam Spade asks a waiter to hurry his order of chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes. In real life, the novelist frequently dined there when he worked next door at the Flood Building at 870 Market Street as an agent for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
“It’s easy to picture my grandfather at one of the booths at John’s,” said Hammett’s granddaughter, Julie Rivett, who aims to preserve his literary legacy.
So does John’s. That’s why in 2007, when someone stole a statuette of the book’s avian namesake from a glass case, the restaurant’s owner took it seriously. He offered a $25,000 reward for the falcon replica, a copy that had been signed y the film’s last living cast member, Elisha Cook Jr.
“Everyone played along with this drama,” said Lee Houskeeper, a longtime San Francisco press agent who has his own booth at John’s—number 21. Houskeeper recalled that managers grilled employees one-by-one under hot lights and cordoned off the glass case with yellow caution tape.
But to no avail. The bird was not found, so instead a replica of the replica was fashioned—this time by San Francisco Art Institute sculptor Peter Schifrin, with the help of two student assistants. They took some artistic liberties, doubling the bird’s size and making it look more falcon-like.
“It’s a terrific, gutsy, gorgeous bird,” Rivett said.
This time the restaurant wasn’t going to take any risks—they filled the statuette with lead and fishing weights.
“That thing ain’t going anywhere,” Houskeeper said.
John’s holds tight to its literary fame for good reason; it’s gotten a lot of mileage out of a single sentence. The restaurant was named a literary landmark in 1997—one of only five in California. A 1982 matchbook from the restaurant emblazoned with Hammett’s image describes it as the place “where good friends and famous personalities have met since 1908.”
And the phone number back then? 986-DASH.