Years ago, there was a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco called Casa Sanchez. One of the owners came up with an interesting idea: if you show up with their logo tattooed where it can be seen on your body, you can have free food for life.
I will tell you this right now: if the Double T Diner in Perry Hall offers a deal like this, I will be at the tattoo parlor tomorrow right after my nap!
The owner of Casa Sanchez was told by his sister (also his business partner) that she figured this might wind up costing them somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.8 million. And that's a neighborhood in which I would feel comfortable, and so did the boss, because he went with the deal anyway.
Greg Tietz had only been in San Fran for a couple of years in 1998, when the deal was put forth, and he liked the neighborhood where the restaurant was. He lived in the neighborhood and wanted to stay, so he figured that investing in a tattoo would sink his roots into the local soil, so to speak.
"I was just a happy-go-lucky bartender at Bottom of the Hill," Tietz, a video logger for ESPN, told SFGATE. "And I was trying to explore areas of the Mission I hadn't been to, and found myself walking past Casa Sanchez."
The Sanchez tattoo was to be his first inking, and he had some moments of indecision ("Like, boy this really needs to be special, really needs to mean something. I'm nervous about it.") before telling the man with the needle to go right ahead.
"I caught a co-worker friend of mine who had probably a dozen or more tattoos, saying, 'You should come check this place out with me and see what you think of the offer,' and helped me find a good tattoo artist," recalls Tietz.
Fortunately for Tietz, he is happy that the tattoo is there. The logo for the restaurant, by the way, is called "Jimmy the Cornman." It depicts a youngster riding a corncob rocket while wearing a sombrero.
And when he flashed it at the restaurant for the first time, he remembers ordering his first dinner: a "deluxe" carne asada burrito with all of the fixings.
And then that friend, one Guido Brenner, went and got the tattoo himself and joined the free chow club. Tietz and Brenner were actually second and third, though: it turned out that another taco fan was a woman who got the logo tattoo even before the promotion was announced. In fact, the restaurant might have gotten the idea from her after she ate there.
“She loved it so much that she came back with the logo tattooed and said, ‘Hey, what do you think?’ and [they] said, ‘Oh, you get free lunch for life,’” Brenner said.
And so, the race was on. Others went to the same tat parlor, and the story hit the national news on The Associated Press, CNN, and NPR's "All Things Considered."
"I was just like the guy that they kept teasing," Tietz said of his experience on the talk show, "like, 'This guy gets free food for life and wait till you hear what he had to do.'"
Tietz lived in the neighborhood for quite some time and continued to avail himself of the gratis guacamole, but took pride in always leaving a nice tip. ("You don't want to take undue advantage of something like this. It's karma.")
He said that over the years, because so many news organizations called the tattooed tacolovers together for stories, they bonded into a sort of family.
"It was a little community, of those of us that got the tattoo and also, between us and the Sanchez family,” Tietz said.
Alas, as often happens in the restaurant business, the Sanchez family moved on, but the people who took over the place opened it as a pupusa shop called D’Maize, included in their lease agreement the stipulation that anyone with the Jimmy tattoo gets a free pupusa.
Tietz and Brenner dropped by a time or two, but found the atmosphere lacking from the days before. I guess you can't have everything, but you can still have a free dinner.
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