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The Tadich Grill is an American seafood restaurant located in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1849, it is the oldest running restaurant in California. Based in the Financial District, the restaurant sits on 240 California Street. The dining experience features Croatian-style cooking techniques that include grilling seafood over mesquite- and charcoal-broilers for varying flavor profiles and uniform broiling.
The original restaurant opened in 1849 as a coffee stand on Clay Street in San Francisco, California. It was founded by Nikola Budrovich, Frano Kosta, and Antonio Gasparich, three immigrants from Croatia, who launched their restaurant as "Coffee Stand". The establishment was renamed "New World Coffee Stand", following a move to the New World Market, a local market place in San Francisco.
In 1887, their restaurant was purchased by and renamed after John Tadich, a Croatian hailing from Stari Grad on the Island of Hvar. In 1928, Tadich sold the restaurant to another Croatian family, the Buichs. In 1967, the restaurant moved to its present location at 240 California Street; this was after Wells Fargo bought the Clay Street location for redevelopment. The current space is one-third larger than the original, and the Buiches worked with contractors to recreate the Art Deco interior design that the Clay Street space had. All of the moldings and woodwork were copied, and the original Clay Street bar was moved to the present location. The restaurant reopened within one month of moving.
In 1925, Louis Buich implemented Croatian-style cooking at the Tadich grill, requiring chefs to use a mesquite broiler for cooking seafood. The restaurant's use of the grilling technique became popular, and in a single day the restaurant can go through four 40-pound bags of mesquite charcoal. Little has changed in regards to the restaurant's cooking methods, and the restaurant has had only seven chefs since 1925 (as of 2011). After operating at several locations in the previous century, the restaurant's last move in 1967 was to a location on the California Street cable car line.
In 1999, R.W. Apple called the restaurant, "old-fashioned, a nostalgic shrine to local piscine tradition." According to Apple, the restaurant's best known dish is cioppino, a seafood soup created in San Francisco, and other California seafood specialities like Petrale sole and sand dabs. Herb Caen, longtime columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle, was a fan of Tadich's version of the Hangtown Fry, a Gold Rush era combination of scrambled eggs, bacon and oysters. In The New York Times, Sadie Stein wrote in 2013 that the restaurant is "Festive without being stuffy, it offers a taste of the San Francisco of yore while embracing the present day." The restaurant operated a branch in Washington, D.C. from 2015 to 2018