Ernie's

Ernie's was a renowned restaurant in San Francisco, California, for many years. First opened as a modest family-style Italian trattoria around the turn of the 20th century and located near what was the notorious Barbary Coast area of the city, in the 1950s it became world famous as a luxurious restaurant serving mostly traditional French cuisine in what was usually called Victorian or fin-de-siècle bordello-like decor featuring plush red wallpaper, heavy draperies, impeccable white linens, and formal waiters in black tuxedos. Writing in 1979, the well-known gastronome Roy Adries 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 of them even older and as nearly well-known, were the Ritz Old Poodle Dog, Jack's, The Blue Fox, A. Sabella's, and Amelio's. All of them 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; none of these, however, ever enjoyed the reputation for decadent, even illicit, pleasures that many of the others purveyed.

Ernie's first opened around the turn of the 20th century, owned by Ernie Carlesso, who was also its chef. At the time it was a simple Italian trattoria called Ernie's Il Travatore. Located at 847 Montgomery Street near Jackson Square, it was just on the edge of the Barbary Coast, an anything-goes district that had been known throughout the world since the 1850s for its brothels, saloons, opium dens, gambling and dance halls, and restaurants with discreet private dining rooms upstairs where more services than mere food could be provided. The little restaurant serving traditional American-Italian food was so successful that in 1935 Carlesso and one of his waiters, an immigrant named Ambrogio Gotti, bought the building, continuing, however, to rent "rooms upstairs to 'boarders'." Carlesso, the namesake Ernie, died in 1946 and his partner, Ambrogio Gotti, retired in 1947, selling his share to his two youthful sons, Roland and Victor, who had already been working at the restaurant as busboys. Only 21 and 25 years old when they became sole owners, the two brothers continued in that role for the next 48 years.