Berkeley's Smokehouse has occupied the corner of Telegraph and Woolsey since 1951. Everything on the in-person menu is still under $9 — by design.

Berkeley's Smokehouse has held the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Woolsey Street since 1951, and general manager Shakaib Shaghasi has a tidy explanation for why: "Our costs continue to rise, but so does our volume, and that has insulated us. It's a value-oriented business."

That value is specific: every item on the in-person menu at 3115 Telegraph rings under $9 — an Impossible cheeseburger runs $8.49 at the counter — at a time when a Bay Area burger regularly hits $18 or more. No bar program, no tasting menu addendum; the restaurant has held sub-$9 pricing across 74 years on one of Berkeley's most-trafficked commercial corridors.

Jean Kisner founded the place and ran it for nearly five decades before transferring ownership in 1999 to Saleha "Sally" Shaghasi, then a Smokehouse employee. "I am giving it to you. You deserve it," Kisner told her, according to SFGate. Kisner died in 2007. Saleha remains the sole owner; Shakaib manages day-to-day operations as general manager.

A grease fire on February 14, 2019, forced the restaurant dark for nearly two years. The building — old enough to require extensive code upgrades before it could reopen — took longer to rehabilitate than expected. "We originally anticipated opening this fall, but of course, given the age of the building, getting it up to code has added more time than expected to our plans," Shakaib told Berkeleyside in early 2020. The soft reopening came November 27, 2020, with a full public reopening in December, deep in the pandemic. The team came back with one operational change: credit card acceptance, which Berkeleyside reported increased business by 40 percent.

On pricing, Shakaib's position has not moved: "I think nickel-and-diming is a very bad business practice. Everything should essentially be baked into the price." Third-party delivery platforms draw a different line — Uber Eats lists the Impossible cheeseburger at $10.34 — but in-person, the menu has held. Smokehouse is currently open seven days a week: Monday through Thursday 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday until midnight, Sunday until 10 p.m.

Seventy-four years at one address on Telegraph is its own argument: a high-volume counter on a UC Berkeley corridor, no bar margins required, a sub-$9 ceiling that has outlasted a grease fire, a pandemic closure, and two ownership generations. The math, apparently, still works.