Millennials' are destroying the country...

'We’re too nice for Millennials': How a thriving SF restaurant fears for the next generation

By Tessa McLean

Walking into Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco is like walking into any classic Mexican restaurant across the country. Bright red booths with wooden tables line one side of the carpeted space. Scalloped paper placemats illustrated with Spanish words and cartoon drawings explaining their meanings sit at each seat. Mexican tapestries adorn the walls amid colorful artwork and a few sombreros. A giant neon sign with a margarita glass on it glows out front.

But Tommy’s is not your typical Mexican restaurant.

The family-run mainstay in the city's Richmond District has been in business for 56 years, serving Yucatán cuisine to locals and tourists alike. It consistently makes the list of the World’s 50 Best Bars, and it has one of the most reasonably priced and largest specialty tequila menus in the world. Its signature cocktail, the Tommy’s Margarita, was inducted into the International Bartenders Association’s official list and can be found on cocktail menus across the globe.

This mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary is likely what’s kept this neighborhood spot in business for so long, appealing to families as much as owners of Michelin-starred restaurants in a familial, chips-and-salsa-on-the-table kind of way.

But as long-standing restaurants across the city topple and shutter one after another, even jovial owner Julio Bermejo is concerned about how to appeal to a new generation of diners. It’s one he says relies too much on takeout (a feeling many recently closed restaurants have shared) and prefers residing in the virtual world of Instagram rather than chatting with the stranger two stools down at the bar.

“I think I’m doing a poor job reaching Millennials,” Bermejo says, miming looking down at his iPhone and texting rapidly. “We are probably too intrusive and, I don’t know how else to say it, we’re probably too nice.”

But, still, the restaurant is doing fine. On a recent chilly Thursday at 6 p.m. in January (a notoriously slow month for restaurants), a healthy mix of couples and groups of friends and families filter though, eating and drinking and giving the place a lively, warm vibe. It’s not packed, but most seats are full and most any neighborhood restaurant in San Francisco would probably kill to have this kind of consistency.

Bermejo knocks on wood as we talk about the business doing well, but he says it could always be better. San Francisco is expensive, and he wants to increase revenue so he 1) doesn’t have to increase menu prices, and 2) can pay his staff more.

Some of those staff members have literally been with the Bermejo family since the beginning, operating under the ownership of the late Tommy Bermejo and his wife Elmy, who opened the restaurant in 1965. Tommy came to the United States under the bracero work program in the 1950s, and later began working in kitchens to try and save money to bring his family to the United States from Mexico.

When his wife and kids eventually moved to San Francisco, they opened their first establishment on McAllister Street, a small cafe. The duo later opened a barbecue restaurant and bought the building that houses Tommy’s today. But Julio said it was him and his four siblings — who always worked in the restaurant growing up — who encouraged them to change the restaurant’s focus to cooking Mexican food, the food they knew.

Today, 85-year-old Elmy is still in the restaurant every night it’s open (it’s closed on Tuesdays), greeting customers, answering the phone and generally acting as the quiet matriarch of this successful business.

It runs without the appearance of effort. Servers and bartenders deliver hot plates of food and mix margaritas with stunning efficiency, and somehow never look harried or distracted, all while making conversation with guests whenever they can. It’s a well-honed skill in the restaurant industry that largely comes only with many years of experience.

As ice clangs against glassware and the blender whirrs, Bermejo punctuates our conversation with greetings to every new customer, alternating from Spanish to English when necessary and intermittently making sure guests have everything they need.

He wants to know what brought you to Tommy’s. He wants to know if you’ve ever had a really good margarita. He wants to know your kids' names. And not because he’s desperate for you to come back to his restaurant, though obviously he’d love if you did. It’s just their way.

“This is what this generation is missing out on,” Bermejo says. “I want to show you something and not just say, ‘Here’s your food.’ I think that’s why some places last. You don’t just go to Buena Vista for the Irish coffee, you go because you want to watch the guy spill the coffee with the spoon and make the drinks. I make a really good Irish coffee, but I’d rather have it at the Buena Vista. I’d rather have a beer at Toronado. We want to talk to people and not just get people coming in that want to cross it off their list.”

The restaurant’s Outer Richmond location — in Bermejo’s words “the sticks of San Francisco” — prevents a lot of that, he says, but he also says the restaurant has never advertised and they don’t do promotions or happy hour. Each margarita is made with 100 percent agave tequila and fresh-squeezed lime juice, a dedication to quality Bermejo says he won’t compromise on. On my visit, bartenders were even peeling limes before squeezing them because Bermejo said that at this time of year when the fruit isn’t as fresh they can produce too much lime oil, which can throw off the cocktail’s balance.

As the few hanging TVs switch from Telemundo to the Warriors game, two women eating quesadillas at the bar have struck up a conversation with the man next to them about a rare tequila he drove in from Sacramento to come to Tommy’s to taste. Another man at the bar is updating Bermejo about his life — he was a Tommy’s regular who moved out of San Franciso 10 years ago and was back in town visiting.

While restaurant work is always hard, Bermejo says keeping up a neighborhood restaurant like theirs might be the hardest type of all. “I think it’s harder to work at a place where you see people three times a week and be genuine with them than if you’re visiting once in your life,” he said, referencing a recent visit to a 3-starred Michelin restaurant he visited in Italy. “Those places are great, but we see people too often for us to bulls— the guest.”

While the hours can be grueling and something always needs fixing, Bermejo says he knows they’re one of the lucky ones to still be operating in the city. He said he lives by his personal motto and points to what’s written in dry erase marker on the whiteboard behind the bar.

“If you live in San Francisco, please do not forget to remember how lucky you are.”

Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant is located at 5929 Geary Blvd. and is open noon-11 p.m.