Jackson Fillmore investor again in the news

FILLMORE STREET INVESTOR Dr. Anthony Fauci — perhaps better known as the face of public health in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic — is back on Capitol Hill today.

A Republican senator over the weekend released portions of Dr. Fauci’s private diary, amplifying earlier claims that Fauci made the pandemic worse — in fact, may even have started it — helped deprive people of their personal liberties and, perhaps worst of all, was not sufficiently deferential to and adoring of the once and future President Trump.

Fauci was hypocritical, says Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky’s U.S. senator who still shows up for work, in releasing excerpts from Fauci’s diary. Paul says Fauci publicly stood by Trump’s side at some of his most embarrassing press conferences — Clorox up the arse, anyone? — and then wrote something different in his private diary. “What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories,” the senator wrote on Elon Musk’s X platform.

This morning, Fauci seemed to confirm his guilt publicly, for all the world to see, sitting within the sacred walls of the U.S. Senate and invoking his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Fauci was hauled back to Capitol Hill to testify under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which Paul chairs. Although Dr. Fauci had received a “pre-emptive pardon” from former President Biden, Paul has repeatedly referred him to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

SO MAYBE IT’S TIMELY TO REPEAT SOMETHING ELSE we learned during the pandemic: that Fillmore Street also has a claim on Dr. Fauci. It happened during an earlier era when Fauci was in San Francisco trying to help save the lives of AIDS patients. He invested in a restaurant opening on Fillmore Street to be called Jack’s on Fillmore — at least until the owners of the venerable Jack’s restaurant downtown objected. Eventually it came to be known by its address simply as Jackson Fillmore. Fauci even ate there a few times.

The Eater SF blog reported in early 2022 that Jackson Fillmore founder, chef and part-owner Jack Krietzman had acknowledged that Fauci played as big a role in the restaurant as any of its other investors: a strictly financial one.

I haven’t seen Tony in years,” Krietzman told Eater. “He was way too busy during Covid to talk to me.”

As for how the doctor got involved with the restaurant, Krietzman says it’s a classic case of getting connected through a friend of a friend. They first connected in the late 1970s, when Fauci was often in the Bay Area working on the then-new and misunderstood virus destroying San Franciscans’ lives: HIV. Krietzman’s best friend’s uncle knew Fauci from the East Coast and recommended that the epidemiologist get in touch with his nephew, Krietzman’s friend, for insight into the city’s culture.

Krietzman’s best friend naturally recommended Krietzman’s cooking — which led to an opportunity to invest in Krietzman’s restaurant. “I’ve only met him a few times,” Krietzman says. “I think he’s only been to Jackson Fillmore a couple of times… I really don’t know. I don’t talk to him. I don’t talk to an of my partners. They’re just investors.”

That got the attention of the national press. Fox News sent one of its provocateurs to investigate: Steve Hilton, now the leading Republican candidate to become the next governor of California. On February 3, 2022, the Fox website reported:

Fox News host Steve Hilton reviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci’s San Francisco restaurant Thursday on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” telling the host it “was a nice place.”

Hilton quipped that the menu included “lockdown lasagna,” “pizza Wuhan” and “triple-mask tiramisu,” but admitted the food was “delicious” and he had “a wonderful meal.” 

“The service was great, it was good value. It was a sweet place,” Hilton told Jesse Watters. 

“You know, I left there thinking, ‘If only Fauci 10 years or so ago had decided to retire and focus on his restaurant investments, maybe there’d have been no pandemic at all,’ ” he added.

“That was his real calling, restaurateur, and I think we all hoped he would’ve followed that,” Watters replied.

Hilton said he had the chicken al gnocchi at the Italian-American Jackson Fillmore Trattoria in San Francisco, and dubbed the city “the home of the most extreme and crazy and unjustified lockdown in the country,” when noting he had to display his vaccine card to enter the restaurant.

The restaurant has masking measures and vaccination card protocols, Hilton noted.

“Also, there was a very interesting item on the menu that I was convinced was Italian for ‘gain of function’,” he quipped. “But I don’t know. We didn’t get to order that.”

Watters reported that the restaurant received a Paycheck Protection Program loan of over $100,000 in April 2020. The loan has been entirely forgiven.

Fauci is the nation’s highest-paid federal employee, with a net worth of over $10 million, Watters added. He is an investor in Jackson Fillmore Trattoria.

“We’re not trying to tell everybody, ‘Boycott the restaurant.’ Listen, the food looks good. It’s just ironic that Fauci is a restaurateur when he’s so busy bending the curve, or whatever he wants to do.” 

FAUCI’S DIARY REVEALED THAT HE HAS ANOTHER CONNECTION to the neighborhood as well. On October 14, 2020, he wrote: “A few days ago, Julia Roberts sent me beautiful flower arrangement. mailed her my thanks.”

Sometimes neighborhood resident Julia Roberts was not nearly the only California celebrity who appeared in Fauci’s diary. Beneath a line graph of confirmed Covid cases, he wrote: “Had a great call with Barbra Streisand. I accidentally butt called her later in the evening and she said that she was going to call me anyway since she wanted to know if there was any difference between the Moderna and the Pfizer product. I told her none.”

Let’s hope Congress gets to the bottom of this.

EARLIER: Faith Wheeler on Jackson Fillmore: “We’re old school“

HISTORY: Joe Beyer, longtime historian of Calvary Presbyterian Church, which has sat across Fillmore from the restaurant’s location since 1902, reported that in 1939, the space housed The Den Coffee Shop. It was followed by several short-lived restaurants before Jackson Fillmore opened in 1985. Beyer said the space on the southwest corner of the intersection — now home to Blue Bottle Coffee — was then called George’s Fountain. That space later housed a Shumate’s Pharmacy, a tenant still remembered by the tile mosaic in the doorway of Blue Bottle.