Thomas Bennett, 84, has run Miyako Old Fashioned Ice Cream at 1470 Fillmore St. since 1993 — cash only, no seating, hot pastrami subs at prices that still stop people cold.

Thomas Bennett, 84, has been running Miyako Old Fashioned Ice Cream at 1470 Fillmore St. since the business registered with the City on April 15, 1993. A thread on r/sanfrancisco this week reignited attention on the shop after a user reported paying $4.50 for an eight-inch hot pastrami sub with corn chips and potato salad — then feeling compelled to tip $4 on top.

The room is a narrow counter with no seating, cash only, all orders to go. The board covers hot food — pastrami, turkey, Chicago-style hot dogs — alongside an ice cream lineup that Axios SF reported on March 5, 2026 runs to more than 100 flavors, including ube, avocado, lucuma, and macapuno. Prices are not uniform: signs in the shop advertise sandwiches at $3.95, per the Axios piece; at least one customer on Corner.inc logged $9.50 for a pastrami. Bennett's standing instruction, per Corner.inc: "It's cash only, bring singles."

Bennett runs the counter with his daughter Teresa. He chose the name Miyako — Japanese for "capital city" — to draw more Asian customers to a corridor undergoing multicultural change, Axios SF reported. The shop sits a block from Hotel Kabuki at the edge of Japantown, on the stretch of Fillmore that carried the neighborhood's pre-war Black community through redevelopment and into the present. "Buy a soda. Tell a friend. And come back," Bennett told SFist in an April 27, 2025 profile.

No functional website exists. The phone number widely listed online, (415) 931-5260, is reported non-functional by multiple reviewers.