Chronicle
Sam’s Grill, the fifth-oldest restaurant in the country, opened in 1867 as an oyster saloon in San Francisco’s California Market, an open-air food emporium that stood where the Bank of America building now towers. 1867 was just 18 years after the Gold Rush transformed San Francisco from somnolent village to city, two years after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, two years before the firs
t transcontinental railroad connected the coasts. The California Market, Evelyn Wells wrote in her 1939 Champagne Days in San Francisco, was “a great bazaar under a single roof, housing fish stands, vegetable and dairy stands, beer counters and restaurants.”
Sam’s was founded by Michael Bolan Moraghan, a native of Ireland, who called it simply “M. Moraghan’s.” Doris Muscatine wrote of Sam’s in her sweeping Old San Francisco, published in 1975: “In the early days its most popular dishes were breaded turtle steak and green turtle soup, and the proprietors continued to import live deep-sea turtles well into the 1930s.”
Moraghan was an oysterman and seafood purveyor. Along with John S. Morgan’s Morgan Oyster Company, the Moraghan Oyster Company raised oysters in southern San Francisco Bay on beds that sprawled across an area the size of San Francisco. By 1900, though Moraghan’s and Morgan’s men fought ceaselessly with oyster pirates like the young Jack London, these oyster beds were producing 2.5 million pounds of oyster meat a year. The oyster industry in the Bay is gone now, a victim not of pirates but at first of pollution, then of garroting government regulation. Sam Zenovich, who owned the Reception Café at Sutter and Webb (now Spring) Streets, bought Moraghan’s restaurant in 1922. The Reception was an establishment of some repute, a hangout of ring and race fans such as former heavyweight boxing champions John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, and Jack Dempsey. Reception regulars (save Sullivan, who died in 1918) followed Zenovich to his new establishment, which he renamed “Samuel Zenovich Restaurant.” Everyone but Zenovich called it “Sam’s.”
Frank Seput bought Sam’s when Zenovich died in 1937. Seput changed its name to a breezy “Sam’s Grill and Seafood Restaurant.” Sam’s moved to 374 Bush Street in 1946. Seput took sons Walter and Frank Jr.as partners; grandson Gary Seput became sole owner in 1994. Phil Lyons bought Sam’s in 2005, and nine years later sold to a group that is headed by Peter Quartaroli., who has been part of the Sam’s family since 1994. Sam’s still serves petrale, rex sole and sand dabs, and oysters now from Drake’s and Tomales Bays. The only turtle it serves, though, is the mock variety.
--John Briscoe
