Rainy day activities
Where to go when it rains in San Francisco
If God meant for the month of January to be dry, it would not rain so much. Here are five to places to try in San Francisco during our frequent downpours.
By M. T. Eley
San Francisco has sufficient history of booziness to justify the city’s recent, earnest swing towards teetotalism. I try it every other year for Lent myself, which is the less endearing but more enduring version of the trend. But if God meant for the month of January to be dry, it would not rain so much.
January: rain pouring into open windows, soaking jackets, priming lungs for colds, and generally reminding us what real weather is like. A time to step out into the downpour and seek out those bars whose unstreamlined and ruddy interiors contribute to a sensation that you are wrapping the place around you like a warm, dry coat.
Here are five to try this weekend:
Zeki’s Bar
1319 California Street
Website
Two glowing orange lamps are all that suggest this unremarkable gray building off the Market — Van Ness cable car line has two of the most readily available firesides in the city.
Inside is narrow but warmly-lit, with a fireside opposite the bar and one in the back with broad benches. I cannot recall a single instance in which all the fireside seats were taken. Well-stocked shelves behind the bar, usually eight beers on draft — expansive but not so varied as to attract a crowd.
Riptide
3639 Taraval Street
Website
A stout brick fireplace is just the thing when shivering at the sudden, sandy end of the continent two blocks away. There’s a neon sign with a martini glass to help guide you to Riptide, but the blue exterior blends into the twilight grays and navies of Outer Sunset. You want the unmarked door on the left.
Riptide sells cigarette packs for $15 (Marlboro Reds and Lights; Parliaments) and fills both portions of a boilermaker to the brim in dive bar hospitality. More than enough kinds of booze to satisfy anyone. The fireplace — just one, though boasting an immense hearth, is a little more in demand than at Zeki’s. You can wait your turn at the bar, resting your feet on old railroad tracks from the still-under-renovation L line outside.
Homestead
2301 Folsom Street
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Homestead is a hundred yards and years from the nearby Notion HQ in the Mission District, and drinking here is perhaps the closest you can get to drinking in San Francisco before the 1906 quake: high-windowed, tin-ceilinged, paisley-wallpapered, with a gas fireplace purring away in the corner beneath classical beauties by some old masters, certain to console any lonely heart on a rainy night. Beer on draft, bottles in the fridge, ample spirit library with some higher-shelf options behind a windowed cabinet.
As you contemplate the feminine form, take a moment to glance under the west side of the bar, where you’ll find a small plaque: “JOHN ROBB: 1937–2011.” A good thought for regulars on rainy evenings: when you claim a place, you join a long and unfinished list of owners.
Vesuvio
255 Columbus Avenue
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All of Vesuvio seems worn down, worn in, worn out and on the verge of becoming a beat poem. This is it, of course, alongside City Lights next door: all that really remains of the cradle or grave of a disgruntled generation. You don’t go into Vesuvio, you slink into it (after the doorman checks your ID).
And yet, for all that Beats baggage, the bar manages not to be trite or ironic, but still itself: vigorously funny, as the Beats found and idolized it, a two-story bar in a one-point-five story space. Good happy hour specials in case the rain starts early.
Irreverence for the Man reigns still, you’ll notice, as the bartender turns his phone to reveal two stickers: “F*** your Tesla” and “Crime Heals all Wounds.” As Jack Kerouac said, “the only people for me are the mad ones.”
Plough and Stars
116 Clement Street
Website
I once looked up at the Plough and Star’s sign in the middle of a drizzling March day in the Inner Richmond, and without knowing anything else about it turned right inside. I found billiards, beer and bluegrass, and you might too. Without the usual appendages of bars purporting to be Irish, the Plough manages it quite well: dark wood for days, an abundance of IRA propaganda, and live music of some sort so frequently it seems spontaneous and perhaps really is.
A fine place to warm your belly, collect your thoughts and tap your toes — and perhaps the best pint of Guinness in the city, with condolences to many other places claiming that title. Best have two for the rainy walk home.
M. T. Eley is a San Francisco-based writer.
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