San Francisco’s Favorite Spaghetti Shack Has a New Late-Night Menu

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack certainly isn’t the only spot in San Francisco serving an old-school Italian American menu. But it might be the only one I would describe as a punk rock red-sauce Italian dive bar. With its rainbow disco lights and weird chandeliers, its pinball machines and shrine of framed Dolly Parton photographs, the restaurant has the eclectic, lived-in quality of a place where someone — say, a fun aunt — has collected all the things they love.

For more than 20 years, founder (and namesake) Emmy Kaplan was that “fun aunt,” and under her warm-hearted watch, the restaurant played great music every night, sold probably a million plates of spaghetti and meatballs, and cemented its reputation as a quintessentially fun and casual neighborhood joint on the edge of the Mission and Bernal Heights. A legit San Francisco classic.

Then, a few weeks ago, Kaplan announced that she had sold Emmy’s to Mike Irish, the restaurant’s bar manager for the past several years. To everyone’s great relief, the upshot of that sale appears to be that precisely nothing will change. Well, almost nothing. The menu has a few crowd-pleasing additions (lasagna! shrimp cocktail!). And, at least on Fridays and Saturdays, the restaurant now stays open until midnight — a throwback to the early-2000s incarnation of the spaghetti shack, when it was one of the only casual sit-down restaurants in the neighborhood that was open late.

More to the point: On those nights, starting at 9:30, the restaurant serves a special late-night menu, which includes a $9 plate of spaghetti and a meatball parm hero that — spoiler alert — immediately ranks among San Francisco’s most appealing late-night dishes.

Which is what brought us into Emmy’s sparkly, tinsel- and string light–bedecked dining room on a recent Friday night. The restaurant was only one or two weeks into its new late-night offerings, but the prospect of good red sauce Italian after 10 p.m. had a gravitational pull too heavy for us to resist.

Maybe the most impressive thing about Emmy’s is how the restaurant has been a master of capturing so many different demographics. We arrived a few minutes before it shifted over to the late-night menu, and the dining room was a multicultural mix of all different types of parties: young couples, older couples, families with exceptionally hungry teenagers, and swagged-out college kids pregaming on their way to the club.

Emmy’s is known as one of the city’s most family-friendly restaurants, with a longstanding “kids eat free” deal on Tuesdays. It’s also an enormously popular date-night spot — and just doubled down by launching a $60 “Monday Is for Lovers” prix-fixe for two that comes with a bottle of wine. In many ways, then, the new late-night hours are just the latest extension of the restaurant’s ongoing effort to provide things the community really wants — which, in this case, happens to be hearty red sauce Italian at midnight.

Because we arrived a little early, we were able to try the new “Cadillac lasagna” from the regular dinner menu. It was kind of a “deconstructed” version, the pasta sheets arranged in a loose pile rather than cut into a neatly layered square. But the combination of flavors — the rich vodka meat sauce, dollops of sunflower seed pesto and cool ricotta — were just as homey and nostalgic as we’d hoped.

As it turns out, though, it’s easy enough to cobble together a delicious meal ordering exclusively off the new late-night menu, which offers a mix of new dishes and Emmy’s classics. We started with a standard (and perfectly satisfying) version of shrimp cocktail and the crowd favorite cauliflower balls — oozy, stretchy, spherical mozzarella sticks, essentially, with bits of cauliflower mixed in for health (?) and textural interest.

While you can dine at Emmy’s at any time of night and find at least one massive plate of spaghetti and meatballs on every table, the late-night menu gives you the opportunity to order a smaller (but still not exactly petite) order of that red sauce spaghetti — for just $9, with the option to add on a meatball (or vegan meatball). It had been a number of years since I’d had a plate of Emmy’s spaghetti, but we were hooked from the first piping hot, eminently slurpable bite.

The showstopper is that new meatball hero, which repurposes several of the restaurant’s staple ingredients — vodka sauce, pesto, stretchy cheese and maybe the best meatballs in town — and serves them hot on a toasty sesame roll. The sandwich comes with a little squeeze bottle of Calabrian hot sauce, which you don’t really need. The real pro hack is to scoop some spaghetti into the hero so you get a bit of extra sauciness in every bite. This is it: the Platonic ideal of late-night drunk food.

Emmy’s hasn’t done a ton of advertising for the new late-night menu on its social media, and for a while it seemed like maybe we were the only ones who knew about it. But by the time we left, around 11 o’clock, they’d curtained off the front room and turned up the music, and the restaurant had once again started to fill up. The playlist shuffled from MF Doom to Bo Diddley to a plaintive country ballad, and the night owls sipped Cosmos and dug into their plates of spaghetti. And for at least one night, in this one spot, it felt like San Francisco’s late-night scene hadn’t ever died at all.

Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack is open Sun.–Thu. 5–9:30 p.m. and Fri.–Sat. 5 p.m.–midnight at 3230 Mission St. in San Francisco. On Fridays and Saturdays, it serves a special late-night menu starting at 9:30 p.m.