Miners' Restaurant was located at 531 Commercial and 769 Market Streets, San Francisco. Today, this address is the home of the Sydney Town Tavern, named for this part of San Francisco that was once was populated by a rather non-law abiding population of misguided convicts that came from the penal colonies in Australia in the mid-19th century looking to strike gold in California. Known as the Sydney Ducks, this group grew in such large numbers that their turf became known as Sydney Town. Clearly, Miner's Restaurant survived the antics of the Sydney Ducks, at least for a while.

Erica Peters, Director of the Culinary Historians of Northern California, has supplied some history of Miner's. In 1859 the Daily Alta reported that "many of the rag-pickers dine at the Miners' Restaurant, on Commercial street, where they can get a meal for a dime."

1863: Story on the rebuilding of the Miners' Restaurant, on Commercial street, between Montgomery and Sansome streets: "The old frame building, recently torn down, on the site of the new structure, was erected in three days working time; but it was a mere shell, clothed and papered inside, and clap-boarded outside. The new building is one of the most substantial in the city, with extra heavy brick wall, iron girders weighing two tons each, and is, in all respects, a first-class building... The new building, like its more humble predecessor, was built for Mr. Cordier, the gentleman who has for so many years successfully catered for the public in that location, and will be opened by him, for the accommodation of the million, on or about the 1st of January, 1864."

1865: "A Specimen Bear: Among the mass of fat things going to make up the splendid show of eatables —fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables, fruit, and every conceivable luxury in the shape of cooked dishes, in the front of the New Miners' Restaurant on Commercial street, between Montgomery and Leidesdorff streets, we notice a cub bear, weighing four hundred and twenty-nine pounds. killed on Russian River. Young Bruin will be served up to the customers of the establishment to-day by Messrs. Hirth & Co., who succeeded to the proprietorship when Mr. Cordier left for Europe, six months since, to enjoy the fortune which he had accumulated by feeding the million"

Courtesy Henry Voigt Collection

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