Not your average burger joint, to be sure, as Fuddruckers likes to decorate its walls with bits and bobs of interesting history and "stuff" its owners find interesting.
So it was that Mark De Paula was on his way out of the door after dining there that he came face to face with a 109-year-old description of a story his family had repeated a thousand times around its dinner table.
An antique copy of a San Francisco Chronicle front page recounted the whole story in fading black and white, about how the Steamer City of Rio de Janeiro was holed upon its approach to bridge-less San Francisco Bay back in 1901, killing 131 passengers and crew - among them the great-grandfather of De Paula's wife.
Turns out Tom Brady was a ship's engineer aboard the Rio when she was opened to the sea on her approach to a fogbound San Francisco Bay. Most of the crew abandoned their posts in a hellbent race to get topside but Tom stayed at his post, giving the ship power until she turtled and went down in 300 feet of water - about where the South Tower of the Golden Gate is now.
The papers of the day credited Brady with saving lives and with staying at his post while all others were abandoning theirs. De Paula asked the owners of Fuddruckers if he could buy the paper but they declined, offering to present it to his wife's mother if she would come in for dinner sometime.
Last week the De Paula's visited Fuddruckers with Dorothy Landucci, Mark's 85-year-old mother-in-law and her husband Edo. De Paula hadn't told her about the Chron front page and she was staggered when Fuddruckers owners George and Rebecca Almeida presented it to her - and picked up the check for dinner.
"We are amazed and pleased we could pass on this page to somebody who had a real connection to this event," Rebecca Almeida told Carl. Here's the whole story if you like sea stories, history, and happy endings.
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