Sparky's Diner

Sparky's Diner

Sparky's is a fixture for all sorts of Castro folks as well as people crossing town on the 22 Fillmore, F line or J Church Metro as well as Safeway shoppers and local area residents and students at Mission High. It's funky and stale like cigarette smoke in the hair, but it's fun and they play and replay music from an era long gone to lend authenticity to the ambience they think we want and need to accompany the burgers, fries and shakes.

The burgers are pretty straight foward, a decent meat patty, a toasted bun, some torn head lettuce, a slice of unripe tomato and thin slices of wilten red or white onion. The fries are good, portions vary widely for no reason, but the fries if still hot are really fine. The guys and dolls who take orders and serve it all can be pretty spacy, but they're almost always really nice and doing the best they can so it's mellow. Most are covered with tattoo's and piercings and are really young, but they care and don't seem like automatons. One of the cool things here is they let you pick and choose from a two column menu so you can have a burger and spinach salad for half the price of a burger and salad across the street at Chow. It could use a little updating I suppose but that would be such a cave in to the BS that drives the real diners into extinction. Sparky's is a great diner with a lot of flair and pizzaz.