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The Buena Vista is a café in San Francisco, credited with introducing Irish coffee to the United States in 1952. It opened in 1916 when the first floor of a boardinghouse was converted into a saloon. The current owners also operate the Trident in Sausalito.
Irish coffee
Stanton Delaplane, a travel writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, drank Irish coffee at Shannon Airport, then worked with the Buena Vista Cafe to start serving it on November 10, 1952, and worked with the bar owners Jack Koeppler and George Freeberg to recreate the Irish method for floating the cream on top of the coffee, sampling the drink one night until he nearly passed out. The group also sought help from the city's then mayor, George Christopher, who owned a dairy and suggested that cream aged at least 48 hours would be more apt to float. Delaplane popularized the drink by mentioning it frequently in his travel column. The Cafe has served, by its count, more than 30 million of the drinks.