Just For You Cafe, longtime San Fran breakfast joint that inspired ‘Bob’s Burgers,’ shutters after COVID, inflation

Just For You Café, a cozy brunch spot in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood — the blueprint for the Belcher family’s burger joint on the Fox series — shuttered after 43 years on Monday.Pandemic-incurred debt, rising inflation rates and building issues led to its closer, owner Reid Hannula told SFGATE. “The long and short of it is that we really haven’t been making money since COVID, and it’s just been kind of a battle,” he told the outlet. “I used a disaster loan to float us, personal money to float us … I love the restaurant, but it hadn’t been able to pay me for the last two years.”In the long-running series, which debuted in 2011 and is now in its 13th season, Bob Belcher runs his dream restaurant, Bob’s Burgers, with his wife, Linda, and children Tina, Gene and Louise.

Reoccurring characters in the show — which also spawned a 2022 movie — have been voiced by stars like Kevin Kline, Jenny Slate, Sarah Silverman, Aziz Ansari and Zach Galifianakis.When creator Loren Bouchard was developing the show, he traveled around San Francisco snapping pictures of restaurants for inspiration, and when he came upon Just For You, he immediately knew it was something special.“I looked in the window and saw something big,” he told SFGATE. “Like, bolt-of-lightning big.”Bouchard especially liked its pass-through between the kitchen and the front counter, which he compared to “a children’s puppet theater.” He then asked a local artist, Sirron Norris, to draw an interior modeled after its design, so he could create scenes in which Bob could interact with his family while working the grill.The beloved restaurant — which was known for its comfort-food menu of specialties like New Orleans-style fluffy beignets dusted with powdered sugar and.