Mike Irish, Owner of Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack
Mike Irish is his actual name.
Welcome to my episode with the current (it no longer works to say “new”) owner of one of my favorite places in San Francisco—Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. I’m not sure where to begin, but I suppose a sprinkle of backstory can’t hurt.
Back in 2022, I recorded an episode with Emmy Kaplan, then the owner and forever the founder of Emmy’s. It was a fun interview, and through that chat with Emmy, we discovered that we had been across-the-street neighbors in the Mission back in the early 2000s.
Fast-forward to summer 2024 when I applied to be on KQED’s Check Please! Bay Area and rated Emmy’s as my No. 1 pick among the three spots I proposed. Then a funny thing happened—before we shot the Check Please episode, Emmy sold her restaurant to one of the bartenders at the place—Mike Irish.
That brings us to this episode. From the first time Erin and I met Mike at the bar at Emmy’s, I knew I liked the dude. Now let’s get to know Mike together as he approaches the one-year mark of owning his first restaurant, an SF institution.
Mike was born in Houston, but he didn’t stay there long. His dad ran catering trucks for restaurants, and soon moved around bit before settling in Arizona, in the Phoenix area, where Mike mostly grew up.
He came of age in the late-Nineties/early 2000s. Being in Arizona, Mike tells us some of the things about life there that he just considered normal, things like wearing oven mitts to get into your car in the summer. It was hot, but swimming pools were easy to find.
Sports was pretty central to young Mike’s life. He played basketball, baseball, soccer, and other sports. His dad coached some of the teams he was on. He was a good kid. Basketball took over, eventually. He looked up to local players, especially Charles Barkley, whose number Mike shaved into his head.
But after a couple years playing in high school, basketball started to fade and was replaced by theater and drama. Looking back, he calls it a “hard turn,” but we both recognize the plasticity of that age—the teen years.
In his drama classes, Mike gravitated toward writing. He played guitar and wrote songs. He wrote a play for his school. All that young talent and creativity led to Mike and his friends making movies. He was also in bands playing mostly folk music.
With all this going on, he met his first girlfriend. They dated briefly, didn’t talk for 20 years years, and today are married. But we’ll get to that later.
Mike graduated from high school and went to New York City for college pretty much right away. He had visited NYC once before and liked it. He got into film school there, beginning a journey that lasted until three years ago or so.
And so, for nearly 20 years, Mike Irish existed as a filmmaker in New York City.
The school and his place were both in Manhattan. When he first arrived, he knew one guy from a band they’d both been in, and Mike was grateful for that. But of course they didn’t become close in their new hometown, as they attended different schools and made new friends.
Mike made student films, and kept going after he graduated. To survive and pay rent, he started bartending, something that, later in life, would prove crucial to where he is today. I ask him to name-drop some of the bars in New York where he worked. He rattles off several, then summarizes by saying he worked at possibly 50 different sports in NYC.
We talk about the films he made over that almost two-decade span. Some won awards, both domestically and internationally. The most highly acclaimed of his movies was The Life of Significant Soil, which Mike says he’s seen being played on airplanes. Another movie, Permanent Collection, premiered in San Francisco at the Roxie. Mike came out here for that and stayed for a week.
That was February 2020, weeks before COVID shut The City and the world down.
Going back to his first girlfriend, whom Mike had met in high school, she already lived in San Francisco. They had lost touch over the years. But she noticed his name on a movie showing at The Roxie and came out to the premiere. A reconnection was made, but Mike returned home to New York after that week.
Still, the two kept in touch. Once it was possible, one would fly out to be with the other, either in New York or here in San Francisco. That eventually gave way to Mike’s decision to move to The City.
Part 2 picks up right where we left off in Part 1, with Mike’s move to The City. It was 2021, around the brief lull in COVID cases before Omicron hit.
Full disclosure: This part of my episode on Mike has way more content about me than most of what I publish here on Storied. I guess you’ll just have to deal.
Mike knew he could fall back on bartending here while he figured out his next gig in his new city. He’d taken one of what he calls a “big swing” with his move to New York City when he was 18. Now was time for another big swing, this one in San Francisco.
He worked briefly at a mezcal bar on Valencia and a month at a cocktail bar in Emeryville. Then, fate wanted a word with Mike Irish.
Someone he met at a memorial for a friend grew up with Emmy Kaplan and mentioned the restaurant to Mike, suggesting he try to work there. He started off with one or two shifts a week, mostly filling in. And then Emmy offered Mike more shifts.
This is one of several points in the podcast where I go on and on about myself. I share the story of my own decades-long experiences with Emmy’s, but for good reason. It culminates with my first time eating inside since the pandemic, when Erin and I sat at the bar and met Mike.
Back to Mike’s story, Emmy had just got her liquor license and needed a bartender who could do that. Mike was the guy.
He became “bar lead” (they couldn’t call the role “manager” and have Mike still receive tips) and created the cocktail menu for the place. He left the hiring of bartenders to Emmy, but Mike eventually took over ordering. He says he’s always had a mind for the business side of things, something not all bartenders carry with them. That possibly stemmed from Mike’s time making movies. He says film production is “the exact same thing” as running a restaurant.
Then we get to the elephant in the room—how Mike ended up owning his boss’s restaurant.
Emmy had told Mike that a neighborhood bar near her restaurant might be up for sale, and that he should look into buying it. She brought a broker into Emmy’s and he sat at Mike’s bar and chatted with him about what Mike thought was that bar for sale. It turned it he was talking about Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack being on the market. It was roughly early spring 2024, and by summer, the deal was done. Emmy and Mike kept that broker, but ultimately worked it all out themselves.
He does share the story of how the deal almost fell through. Obviously, it didn’t. But you just gotta hear this one. He says most of their agreement is verbal/handshake, which speaks to how cool Emmy is.
I prompt Mike to do something he says he hadn’t really done at the time of the recording—reflect on the massive life changes he’s been through just in the last five years. He moved across the continent, got engaged (and since married), had his first kid, bought a car, bought a business. That’s a lot.
Mike says that, after the first day of operation with him as the owner of Emmy’s, it all hit him—how hard it was and was going to be moving forward. He couldn’t take a day off or call in sick. After about a week or so of mental anguish, though, it all started to click for him.
And then we get to the part of this episode where my life and Mike’s really got intertwined—when I went on Check Please! Bay Area last summer, right around the time that Mike took over Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. In our recording, Mike did something that I don’t think anyone who’s been on this podcast has done over the eight years we’ve been around—he turned the mic around and asked me some questions. I was happy to oblige, since he was unaware of how applying to and being on Check Please! works.
This part of the podcast is essential Check Please! Behind the Scenes.
We end the podcast with Mike’s take on our theme this season—Keep it local.
We recorded this podcast at Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack in the Mission in April 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
