The Only Place Harry Bosch Visited in San Francisco
One Wednesday in December, I had the pleasure of eating at the only place in San Francisco that Harry Bosch ever visited.
In The Black Box, Bosch has to fly to San Francisco and drive up to San Quentin State Prison to interview a prisoner. On the way back, he stops for dinner at the Balboa Café, Bar, and Grill on Fillmore Street because it is halfway between the prison and the airport.
“The Balboa Bar & Grill in San Francisco was a midway stop between SFO and SQ that was favored by homicide investigators from the LAPD,” writes Connelly in The Black Box, the 16th Bosch novel.
I’ve read a few articles taking Bosch fans on culinary tours of the detective’s favorite eateries in Los Angeles. When or if I next get to L.A., the top of my to-do list is pancakes at Du-par’s and dinner at Musso & Frank Grill. But the Balboa Café is the only San Francisco restaurant he’s visited, so it’s the only place in The Bay area where you can eat like Bosch. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the only place in San Francisco he’s set foot in.
I re-read all the Bosch books last year, and I kept an eye open for Bosch’s visits to San Francisco. Though based in Los Angeles, Hieronymus has made trips in the books to Las Vegas, Mexico, San Diego, Florida, even Hong Kong. To my mind, there is no city in the world more exciting to write about than San Francisco, and it was fun to realize Bosch actually ate at the Balboa.
The restaurant wasn’t far out of my way during my December visit. After writing five novels set in Haight-Ashbury during the late 1960s, my next book will be set four miles northwest and fifty-plus years later than The Haight Mystery Series. The Presidio Biotech (to be published in the fall) is the story of a startup team working in 2024 in the Presidio, the federal park just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. They’re running out of cash and can’t attract investors, so they retool their product so it can be used by criminals. Of course, that backfires on them.
I was doing some research in the Presidio, and the Balboa is walking distance from there so I stopped in for lunch, pulling up a chair at its long, elegant bar.
The Balboa opened its doors in 1913 as a working man’s saloon. The venerable watering hole was taken over by the Plumpjack group (co-founded by California Governor Gavin Newsom) in 1995. The café’s website says the new owners “elevated the menu” while retaining a few old favorites.
Bosch had a hamburger when he ate there, but I chose the Chicken Paillard (aspecial on Wednesdays). This dish of breaded chicken in a white wine sauce was fantastic.
Chatting with the bartender, I learned that the Balboa used to be a regular after-work hangout for the police officers and firefighters who lived in the neighborhood. But that tradition has long vanished as so few of them can afford current San Francisco property prices.
I asked if people still come in looking for the place where Harry Bosch ate, and the bartender said it was a thing about ten years ago (the Black Box was published in 2012) but not so much these days.
It was a great lunch, and a great opportunity to get a taste of San Francisco’s lone appearance in the Bosch canon.
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Hi, I’m Peter Moreira, author of The Haight Mystery Series, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you want to receive my blogs regularly, please sign up for the mailing list at my website by clicking here. As well as regular blogs about Michael Connelly and other crime fiction writers, you’ll receive The Ashbury Hideaway, a free novella in ebook format. In this prequel to The Haight Mystery Series, Jimmy Spracklin’s teenage daughter runs away to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Spracklin knows about the drugs, sexual predators and bikers in Haight-Ashbury, and he has to find her before she comes to harm.
The Haight Mystery Series is set in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late 1960s. Each book is a whodunnit with hippies. Described as ‘Gritty and Groovy” (Tampa Bay author George L. Fleming) and “Fabulous” (Pamela Callow, author of the Kate Lange series), the Haight books chronicle the investigations of SFPD Lieutenant Jimmy Spracklin into homicides in the hippie enclave. If you’re interested in the 1960s, fond of San Francisco or just love great page-turners with strong characters, check out the series with The Ashbury Hideaway. I hope you enjoy the novella enough to move on to the five novels (so far) in the series.
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