Ernie's

Ernie's (1900–1995) was a restaurant in San Francisco, California. It began as a modest family-style Italian trattoria around the turn of the 20th century. It was located near the notorious Barbary Coast area of the city. In the 1950s, it became known as a luxurious restaurant serving mostly traditional French cuisine. The interior had Victorian or fin-de-siècle bordello-like decor, with plush red wallpaper, heavy drapes, white linen and formal waiters in black tuxedos. Writing in 1979, gastronome Roy Andries de Groot called it "unquestionably the most elegant, famous, finest, and luxurious restaurant in San Francisco and [it] is probably among the three or four greatest truly American restaurants in the country" that "can provide dinners of supreme elegance and luxury". When it closed in 1995, it was one of the few remaining restaurants of the kind that had once epitomized the celebrated San Francisco dining scene. Among the others, some even older and nearly as well-known, were the Poodle Dog Restaurants, Jack's, The Blue Fox, A. Sabella's and Amelio's. All are now gone, and only a few vestiges of the 19th century still remain in San Francisco: Tadich Grill, Sam's and John's Grill, though none ever enjoyed the reputation for decadent, even illicit, pleasures that many of the others purveyed.