Believe the Teens: Beep’s Is SF’s Best Spot for Late-Night Burgers and Shakes

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

The ’60s-style neon “Beep’s Burgers” sign, with its blinking, stylized satellite logo, called out to us like a beacon in the night.

We’d come to Ocean Avenue at 10 o’clock on a cold, rainy Friday because we heard that this old-school drive-up burger shack is open until 2 a.m. — and that it’s the late-night food spot for local teens, who are utterly devoted to the garlic fries and the chocolate shakes.

Turns out it’s true: Big, giggly groups of high schoolers kept pulling up all night, in matching varsity jackets after the game, or amped up on adrenaline on their way to a party. There were teenage couples, arm in arm. Lone wolf teens, there strictly for the food. Others arrived in minivans with their parents and siblings, all buttoned up in suits and ties on their way to the night service at a nearby church. The high school teacher in our duo even ran into a current student of his — who’d driven all the way from Oakland with his family to satisfy a burger craving.

If you have a teenager in your life, there are even odds you’ll run into them at Beep’s too.

As expected, everyone was ordering milkshakes and big, heaping trays of fries, which, if memory serves correctly, constitute something like 60% of the American teenage diet. You can trust their expertise on this topic is what I’m saying.

Usually, when Beep’s has gotten press in the decades since the restaurant first opened in 1962, it’s for being anachronistically affordable — “the best $7 burger in San Francisco,” one 2017 review proclaimed. Like everywhere else in the city, the prices here have crept up a bit: The quarter-pound burger now starts at $9.25, without fries or a drink. Still cheap enough for a student budget, especially if you split an order of fries. More to the point, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better burger in the city at a lower price (and yes, that includes In-n-Out).

The cheeseburger had everything I look for: a well-charred crust on a loosely compacted, exceptionally juicy patty. Melty American cheese (or cheddar for the wrong-headed). A squishy bun. There’s nothing complicated happening here; the closest comparison would be a really good backyard burger. We didn’t see until too late that you have to ask for pickles and onions, but the high school regulars behind us in line had their orders down to a science, requesting In-n-Out-style customizations like the addition of both grilled and raw onions.

The only thing we didn’t love were those very popular garlic fries. We’d been expecting more of a ballpark style, overloaded with heaps of fresh garlic, and these were more subdued, with a starchy outer coating that stayed somewhat crispy while they cooled. They were fine. Mostly, we wished they were a lot hotter.

Just about everything else was fantastic. The compact, impeccably crunchy fried chicken sandwich was hot and juicy, and so much easier to eat than the behemothic chicken sandwiches most trendy shops are selling these days. The onion rings were similarly well-fried — the crisp breading a counterpoint to their soft, sweet, slippery insides. Even the very standard-looking chicken nuggets were much better than the norm.

If you’re going to go to Beep’s for one thing, though, let it be for those milkshakes, which are thick and substantial but still slurpable through a straw as soon as they come out. Both the chocolate and the Oreo were some of the very best we’ve had in the Bay — the rare shakes you drink down to the last drop.

The thing that’s great about Beep’s is how lively and social it feels, even though you’re essentially eating in a small, crowded parking lot. Double- and triple-parking seems to be the norm, and there’s almost no seating to speak of — just one picnic table (abandoned on this drizzly night) and a longish counter running along the front of the shop. Most customers either grabbed their food to go or sat back in their cars with the doors open, stereos blasting, to scarf it down while it was fresh and hot.

You don’t have to be a teenager to feel the buzz of excitement of being out late with the people you like best — of sharing a mess of fries, with the night still young and full of promise. You don’t even have to like the burgers to feel a twinge of sweet nostalgia for that kind of free and easy life. But the burgers definitely help.

Beep’s Burgers is open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m.–2 a.m., and Sunday 11 a.m.–2 a.m. at 1051 Ocean Ave. in San Francisco. There’s also a newer East Bay location in Danville.