Alicia Walton, the Sea Star

San Francisco has plenty of smart cocktail bars, and plenty of beloved dive bars. Much rarer is a bar like the Sea Star, whose co-owner, Alicia Walton, serves up serious drinks for reasonable prices in a setting that wouldn’t alienate a Bud Light drinker. “A lot of people in Dogpatch are still blue collar,” says Walton (pictured above, center). “They don’t want a $15 cocktail.”

Before she took over the Sea Star in 2015 with partners Tommy Shaw and Ryan Gilbert, Walton made the rounds at other serious, but not too fancy, cocktail bars in the city — Comstock, Elixir, Bloodhound and Brass Tacks. But it was at decidedly uncool watering holes like Lefty O’Doul’s and Martuni’s where she cut her teeth — and before that, at Figaretti’s Italian restaurant in her hometown of Moundsville, W.Va. “I learned how to bartend from women who were raising their families on this job,” Walton says. “It wasn’t a getting-through-college kind of thing.”

Walton’s personality — her emphatic easygoingness, her infectious laughter — infuses every corner of the Sea Star, which has operated as a bar since at least 1899, and has the trough to prove it. Dogs (including Walton’s own) roam indoors. Regulars shoot pool. Local bands play music under the bar’s enormous, neon pink octopus chandelier.

And Walton isn’t afraid to make a big-personality statement in a drink. Her Nasty Woman cocktail is composed of spirits from women-owned companies — Avua cachaça, from Brazil; Spirit Works sloe gin, from Sebastopol. At $12, it’s pricier than most drinks on the menu, and one of the best, with its aromas of bitter citrus melting into rich, plummy, spice-tinged flavors. It’s fruity but not sweet — feminine, maybe, but powerful.

Some of her drinks are arrestingly simple, at least by San Francisco cocktail standards: a Kentucky Mule on draft; a series of unadorned highballs. The Monte Vida shooter is a 50-50 blend of Amaro Montenegro and Vida Mezcal, meant to be thrown back. It’s smoke, it’s caramel, it’s delicious — and yet it works as a shot.

It can be hard now to imagine Walton anywhere but the Sea Star, so perfectly matched does she seem to her setting. But her career is just getting started. “This won’t be my last bar,” she says.

2289 Third St., S.F.