I Believe I’ve Discovered San Francisco’s Most Affordable Burger

But inflation, coupled with ever-rising costs of goods and labor in the city, has finally started to take its toll on one of San Francisco’s go-to cheap eats.

A San Francisco Reddit post a few weeks back revealed there may still be one crazy cheap cheeseburger to be had, and it comes from the unlikeliest of places: Hawaiian Drive Inn, a 26-year-old Hawaiian barbecue restaurant in Portola run by a Chinese couple that has its cheeseburger priced at a mind-boggling $3.75.

I ventured out to Portola a couple weeks ago, and what I found was a stark yellow restaurant with maybe 40 seats. There was a pair of faded, framed posters from Hawaii’s Polynesian Cultural Center, what looked like years-old Christmas decorations hanging above the cash register and a curious recycling bin made out of an old paint bucket.

Calling Hawaiian Drive Inn “unassuming” would’ve been generous.

The burger itself is right up there with Sam’s — a simple beef-and-buns offering with the works that I housed fast enough to make me wonder if I should’ve gone in on the comically priced $4.75 double cheeseburger.

I later find out while talking to co-owner Maggie Zhou that this is one of nine Hawaiian Drive Inn locations spread across the Bay Area — Maggie and her husband Alan Huang have sold all but two of the locations (this one at 2600 San Bruno Ave. and a second in Concord that they plan to pass on to their oldest son).

Virtually all of them still rock the wildly cheap cheeseburger, which high school kids and local blue collar workers stream in to order at a fairly regular pace.

“We started the business with a couple thousand dollars,” Zhou told SFGATE. “And we’ve kept the burger at that price basically because our philosophy, our goal, is to share the aloha spirit.”

Both Zhou and Huang immigrated to the United States from Cantou, China — Zhou to San Francisco, where she graduated from San Francisco State, and Huang to Hawaii, where he worked in Hawaiian barbecue restaurants for a handful of years. Hilariously, the pair attended the same Chinese middle school together — but their paths didn’t formally cross until Huang took a holiday visit to San Francisco and they were introduced by a family friend.