All was not lost, however, as an upswell of - sober? drunk? - public support helped the long-time dive find a new home in Fisherman’s Wharf.
San Franciscans have cemented drunken stories at Gold Dust since 1933, but in 2012 its Union Square landlords gave it the boot for a bland lingerie store. Gold Dust has faced the displacement reaper and survived. To knock back whiskey neat at Gino & Carlo’s, then, is to become part of that (drunken) history. The walls are lined with Herb Caen clippings and photos of larger-than-life patrons past, like Tony Bennett. Not just about Doda, but about all the comings and goings of their beloved home.
As any good neighborhood dive should be, its bartenders and bar-stool-fixed patrons were a fountain of history. When Carol Doda, the topless dancer famous for her silicone-injected 44DDs, died in late 2015, everyone knew where to go to hear the best stories of her toasty good times - Gino & Carlo’s. We love them so much we don’t even mind queuing behind a big group of people only waiting to do blow. And El Rio’s Universal Toilet and Galactic Urinal pioneered single-use, non-gender-specific bathrooms before that was on the national radar. Yes, we love the margaritas to death, but a Tecate and lime under the benevolent gaze of Carmen Miranda is the best way to party at Hard French, Daytime Realness, or Mango.
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El Rio’s tiered backyard makes it the ultimate place to see and be seen while shaking your moneymaker and maybe eating free oysters on Fridays. “Your Dive” remains the gold standard for day-drinking in the Mission - or anywhere, really.
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That’s how The Ave makes sure it keeps up with the times, even if you’re nursing drinks in a neighborhood full of long-time San Franciscans. But The Ave has more than just great local color it’s also got a craft beer menu that’s constantly changing, from Hop Dogma to Karl Strauss, Laughing Monk and more, its selection hails from up and down the coast. A stack of the local paper, The Ingleside-Excelsior Light, is often found on the corner of the bar. Firefighters from the station down Ocean Avenue frequent the joint, as do myriad Ingleside neighbors. The Ave is a dive bar with good taste and a much-needed landing spot for locals. On this unlovely block of Turk Street, a perennial blossoms. Keep your phones in your pockets, boys, lest ye be shamed for that telltale blue glow. That its few tables are sometimes reserved tickles us to no end, but a shout-out to DJ Bus Station John’s long-running Thursday night party full of disco rarities and Hi-NRG obscurities, The Tubesteak Connection, is in order. One of only two gay bars left in the once-queer-as-hell Tenderloin, Aunt Charlie’s is also a narrow, carpeted dive where neighborhood regulars gather daily to drink powerful drinks at we-will-not-be-undersold prices. To help you - and, maybe, to help them - we offer the 50 that feel the truest to the spirit of this city, and whose loss we would feel the hardest. If you want random adventure, affably cantankerous service, and (mostly) cheap beer, wade into S.F.’s glorious ecosystem of dives. If you want standardization, predictability, and good lighting, go to Starbucks. But many are barely known outside their immediate neighborhoods. Some are like de facto private clubs, while others serve $12 craft cocktails to keep the lights on. As with the Supreme Court’s you-know-it-when-you-see-it definition of pornography, the exact parameters of what constitutes a dive are contingent and fuzzy. In spite of the massive changes the 21st century has wrought on San Francisco, there remains a bright constellation of grimy, crusty joints with inches-thick layers of character, like the tree rings of a sequoia that survived one fire after another. In our vision of Hell, every surface is sticky and every table needs a shim.įunny how that applies to more than a few dive bars, which we also consider to be the next best thing to paradise.
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