Those who eat at Lefty O’Doul’s tend to like it as much for its unassuming atmosphere as its hot brown food. It’s a place to go get fed simply, cheaply, and in relative obscurity while downing a meticulously made bloody Mary. But the bar and restaurant opened by the former baseball great wasn’t always a hole-in-the-wall hoffbrau. It turns out there’s an enormous, abandoned theater above the small, dark restaurant — a space that takes up a 3/4-block chunk of Geary Street. In a recent upstairs excavation, current Lefty’s owner Nick Bovis discovered the only known written copy of the Bloody Mary recipe, in O’Doul’s own hand. Don’t expect him to share it, though. According to NBC, “Bovis said he’s thinking about marketing the original 1966 version.”
