The two signs on Luisa Hanson’s Italian restaurant on San Francisco’s Guerrero Street contradict one another. One blasts, “NOW OPEN!” on a paper sign; the other reads, “Luisa’s Ristorante and Wine Bar Since 1959.”
How can an establishment be just opened and around since 1959 at the same time?
The mixed messages, both true, are emblematic of the 93-year-old Hanson. She is one of San Francisco’s least-known and underrecognized restaurateurs, while also being one of its unequivocal legends. To know Hanson is to know her two sides—the warm, indulgent Italian grandma who’s an industry pioneer, and the sharp-elbowed, suspicious businesswoman who’s a bridge-burner.
Though she was married at 14 and stayed wedded for the next 50 years, her restaurants are her life’s true love, the only romance that’s ever really mattered to her. “This is my sex,” she says, rubbing the restaurant table in front of her on a recent evening.
Hanson says she unveiled her first restaurant in 1954 in the Castro, and then went on to open and close upward of two dozen more over the next 70 years: Luisa’s, Luisa Continental Restaurant, Mama Luisa’s, Macambo Club and Restaurant, All That Pasta, Luisa’s Pizza and Pasta, Pastella’s Pizza and Antipasti among them. Today, there are only two left: Luisa’s Ristorante and Wine Bar on Guerrero Street and Luisa’s Restaurant on Columbus Avenue. But she’s already making plans for another.
Hanson describes herself as a third-generation cook, taking after her grandmother (who lived to be 105) and her mother (a spry 107), who taught her everything she knows in the kitchen. That’s one side of her legacy; the other can be found in the decades-old articles about community uprisings she’s stirred, the lattice of lawsuits she’s faced and her bankruptcy filing in 2009.
Yet despite her great genes and her roller-coaster life in restaurants, it’s becoming clear Hanson can’t avoid the inevitable. One day her voice, low and slow like a femme fatale with vocal fry, won’t be telling stories anymore, informing you your husband is “a hunk” and singing the praises of her five-star gnocchi. Her back is stooped, and she has a cane carefully hidden away in her preferred booth at Luisa’s. Someday she will hand over the keys to the empire—but not yet.
“I quit; I die,” she says.
