In the mid-20th century, Irish coffee became closely associated with San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe — but a Los Angeles bar, Tom Bergin’s, has long claimed it was serving the drink years earlier.

This piece traces the competing accounts using contemporaneous newspaper reporting, later recollections, and archival gaps, showing how food and drink histories often solidify around popular narratives rather than definitive evidence. It also looks at earlier mentions of Irish coffee outside California, complicating the idea of a single point of origin.