San Francisco has lost one of its longest serving restaurateurs, as we learn Wednesday that House of Prime Rib owner Joe Betz has passed.

The Chronicle reports that Betz, born Josef Betz, has died at age 86. Betz has been in the restaurant business in San Francisco since he first arrived here in 1962, at age 22, and worked his way up from being a waiter to being a restaurant and nightclub owner, and ultimately to owning one of the city's most iconic and long-lived restaurants, The House of Prime Rib.

The restaurant, which opened in 1949, has been under Betz's ownership for 40 years, since 1985, when Betz purchased it from founder Lou Balaski. And so we have him to thank for maintaining the menu, customs and traditions of the restaurant, which are a throwback, preserved intact, from the mid-20th Century.

Betz retired some years ago from the daily operation of House of Prime Rib (even though he had previously pledged "I won't retire, I'll expire"), and his son Steven has been in charge ever since.

Still, it was Betz who made the video below to announce the House of Prime Rib's big pandemic reopening in the fall of 2020 — albeit premature, as the restaurant would be forced to close again and reopen again. The video is a somewhat spooky reminder of the mid-2020 paranoia about COVID-19, showing all the cleaning products they were using, and new plastic partitions that were installed between booths.

Betz, born in Germany in 1939, said he was on his own by the age of 14 and started waiting tables just to survive.

"Things were different then," he said in a 2011 interview. "The war was ending. I got a job in a restaurant because that's all that was available." And, he added, "In the restaurant industry, if you do a good job, there's always a job."

He was a server in Switzerland at the age of 18 when got a job on a cruise ship, which he used to emigrate to the US. As the story goes, he arrived on the East Coast and worked "up and down" the coast, then worked his way across the country, taking a job in 1962 at another historic San Francisco restaurant that's no longer standing, Hoffman’s Grill.

"Hearty German fare, salty waiters, generous drinks and authentic atmosphere of stained glass, murky paintings and slow fans — that was Hoffman's," said the Chronicle upon its closing in 1984.

Betz would end up owning the place by 1968, becoming one of the city's youngest restaurant owners, and he saw it through to its end, when the building was demolished to make way for a 19-story office building at 619 Market Street. (Betz reportedly walked away with a $3 million settlement, on top of the furniture and fixtures, which likely helped him purchase House of Prime Rib a year later.)

The Chronicle notes that Betz had a stint as a nightclub impresario as well, opening the Park Exchange in the late 1970s, a "supper disco" next to the Transamerica Pyramid — a vintage ad for the place describes it as "a glass gazebo situated in a redwood park in the heart of the financial district."

To the end, Betz was focused on customers, and creating the kind of old-world, welcoming, and ultimately affordable dining experience that was his ideal.

As he said in 2011, "I don't want people coming in and thinking, 'Gosh, how much money will this cost me?'"

Still, he was exacting in his standards at the restaurants, and always ran a tight ship.  As local radio host and longtime House of Prime Rib customer Ronn Owens told the Chronicle, Bets was "the easiest guy in the world to work for, as long as you do everything perfectly."

And the restaurant has not been without its legal issues, being hit with two lawsuits from current and former employees in recent years, alleging labor law violations like denying servers any breaks.

Betz is also remembered for a philanthropic tradition he launched from the restaurant, donating thousands of pounds of prime rib — it was said to be 3,000 pounds in 2023 — for an annual Christmas Eve brunch feast at Glide Memorial Church.

As Betz said of the Christmas Eve feast, "We’re not just donating it, but my sons and I and my grandchildren are there serving it because I want my grandchildren to see there are two sides of the world — and people work very hard."

Related: Glide Primes Up to Serve House of Prime Rib Christmas Eve Feast, and Give Out More Than 2,000 Toys