El Herradero's sign will rise again.
There’s something telling about San Franicsco’s current restaurant world in this little story. A tale of technology and pop-ups, something old and something new.
The other day I was at work and lo and behold, what popped up on my computer but a tweet from Mission Street Food announcing that, due to the fact that the finishing touches were being done to their new restaurant Commonwealth, they were getting rid of the El Herradero sign: Come and get it! I emailed Joe who texted me back. We’ve always loved that sign and I wanted it to be ours.
Until last week, El Herradero’s light-up sombrero sign, orange-tiled awning and kitschy picture-covered walls had long contributed some of the best flavor to a stretch of Mission Street that’s rapidly changing. I’m not one to vilify gentrification—neighborhoods have always ebbed and flowed—but El Herradero’s closing is significant. It wasn’t replaced by some funky dive. The Mission District mainstay was taken over by Commonwealth, a relatively fancy restaurant that ironically sprang from the loins of Mission Street Food. It speaks to the Mission District’s future.
This is where it all starts to come full circle in some poetic way: Mission Street Food was a pioneer in the city’s restaurant recession and came to represent the scrappy result of a rotating group of chefs trying their hand at different foods and serving it very inexpensively. MSF started out as one of the first food trucks in the city. Eventually, it was forced to move into Lung Shang and become one of the city’s most significant pop-up restaurants. The PBR drinkers came in droves. There were long waits.
Today, Lung Shang is now Mission Chinese Food and Commonwealth has a pre-fixe menu serving heady things like goat cooked in hay and liquid nitrogen cocktails. The upscale interior has no trace of its former El Herradero inhabitant.
Meanwhile, Tacolicious—a farmers market stand that become a restaurant in the Marina—is now the proud owner of a historical piece of the Mission District. (Do I hear the hipsters howling in protest or am I just imagining things?)
When Joe showed up at Commonwealth to offer to buy the sign, owner Anthony Myint gave us a great deal—as long as we threw in some tacos to boot. We fed the exhausted crew and came home with a 250 pound-plus sign. I don’t know what exactly we’re going to do with it, but I promise you it’ll be up somewhere in Tacolicious II (and yes, there will be one in the future). Lit up in all its former glory, we can all use it as a reminder of these crazy times.