Owner, Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco, Water Street Grille in Sausalito
Bob Freeman
Published: October, 2001
Owner, Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco, Water Street Grille in Sausalito
I started out working in hotels right out of high school. I went to Dickinson College for a couple of years and decided I wanted to go into the hotel and restaurant business. So I applied to the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. While there, I worked summers at the Virgin Island Hilton and as a flight steward for Pan American Airlines.
I got in the Navy and graduated from Officer’s Candidate School. The orders I received were to manage the Officer’s Club at the Naval Air Base in Rota Spain. I had already learned the best hospitality management training and then I got the Navy version, which you get in one month. But these were fabulous orders; I was very lucky. You know in the 60’s Spain was a real treat.
After the Navy, I was rehired by Pan American Airlines as a flight service supervisor. I flew out of New York for one year and worked flights around the world. One day, I returned from a trip to Africa and my boss asked if I wanted to transfer to San Francisco. I said yes.
It was a management job, I rode along and reported on the flight, checked the food and service. That went on until I hooked with a couple of my old Cornell buddies, Dick Bradley and Peter Lee. Dick was with Merrill Lynch and transferred to San Francisco right about the time I came out with Pan Am. And Peter was in New York working for Sky Chef.
We all thought it was kind of funny, one of us selling stocks, I’m flying around the world on an airline yet we were trained in the hotel and restaurant business. We talked about the pubs in New York and thought something like that would work in San Francisco. I spent my spare time looking for a site and came across 50 Broadway, the corner of Embarcadero and Broadway in San Francisco, underneath the Embarcadero Freeway. That’s how Victoria Station got started.
Victoria Station was named after Victoria Station in London. I was buying British railroad lamps to furnish the restaurant from contacts with British Rail and flying them back using my 50% Pan Am discount. My boss asked me what was I doing with 200 railroad lanterns and I said I’m building a restaurant. He let it pass.
We opened December 19, 1969, building the place in 89 days! I’ve since built over 110 restaurants and I’ve never been able to match that. I was still with Pan Am, doing things like looking for stoneware for the china to use in the restaurant. I was living in Sausalito at the time, at the Ebb Tide Apartments. Don Olson, whose office is still right beside the Water Street Grille, was the architect for Victoria Station. Don kept saying, why don’t you use stoneware from Heath Ceramics down at the other end of Sausalito? I could see the shop from my apartment, but I had no clue as to what he was talking about. So I kept on flying to places like Japan, getting drivers and translators to go looking at all these different pottery plants. In the end, don’t you know it, we bought all the stoneware right here in Sausalito.
I left Victoria Station when it had 86 restaurants. It went up to 104. I moved from Sausalito to the City for a little while but came back and bought a house here in Sausalito on the top of the hill on Channing Way. Then I moved to Kentfield, and it was back again to Sausalito about 3 years ago where I live with my fiancée.
I guess you could say that I’m a serial restaurateur because before long I started a new company called California Cafe. The idea was to work on 4 or 5 restaurants and if we got one that we could expand, we’d do it. That’s exactly what happened. The fifth one was the California Cafe in Mill Valley. Pretty soon we had California Cafes, Napa Valley Grills and Alcatraz Brewing Companies in Minnesota, Denver, New Jersey and one up in Yountville, as well as many other locations around the United States.
I’m still on the Board of Directors, but I’m out of the day-to-day now. I bought the Water Street Grille and the Buena Vista Café with just a few friends as a personal labor of love. The Water Street Grille is on the water in Sausalito, very near to where I live. It’s the old Houlihan’s. I hope one day to renovate it and make it a little bit different, but right now I am very happy with the way it is. We’ve added entertainment on Fridays and Saturdays and that’s done very well for us and I have a good crew. So it’s kind of a coming home for me.
My friends sometimes ask me, why do you keep doing it? I answer, why does the bear go over the mountain? It’s because it’s there. With me, what I do is restaurants. I love the operations, putting them together, making them viable. That’s what I do. That’s who I am.
