John Espejo started Uncle Boy’s with no business experience and no employees. But he had plenty of entrepreneurial drive
“I’m the type of guy where I hate my food being messy, especially a burger,” Espejo told The Examiner. “I don’t like a super-soggy bun ... or when the burger turns into a mushy mess.”
It all contributes to the unique charm of Espejo’s beloved hole-in-the-wall burger spot, shoehorned onto Balboa Avenue a few blocks north of Golden Gate Park. The restaurant — mostly a kitchen and a bar counter bracketed by walls lined with newspaper clippings of San Francisco’s biggest sports moments — is the unlikely end product of a lifelong entrepreneurial spirit and passion Espejo first cultivated as a young boy living 7,000 miles across the Pacific.
Espejo said he and his band of amateur salespeople used to collect buffalo droppings, sack them up and sell them to neighbors who would use them to fertilize their gardens. A large bundle, which Espejo said was bigger than he was in those days, sold for about 10 pesos. As he acclimated to life in The City, Espejo said, he always kept his eyes on his long-term goal of one day opening his own business.After earning an associate degree from City College of San Francisco, Espejo said he worked an assortment of “random jobs” which included selling goods at Home Depot, stocking Dreyer’s ice cream and opening doors at the Roaring Twenties and the Condor Club — former and current gentleman’s clubs, respectively — in San Francisco.
Ex // Top Stories Spilling tea — and Irish coffee — at the Buena Vista Cafe Long-serving staff showed The Examiner how to make the iconic beverage But there was one other major challenge Espejo had to overcome: He did not know how to start a business, let alone run one. The highest level of business-school education he had was a one-year finance program he took at Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School.
John Espejo Richmond District San Francisco
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