Bar History
How the Bay Area grew into a craft cocktail destination.
The Bay Area’s cocktail culture is now mature enough to warrant a history lesson — and its major players are intertwined enough to warrant a genealogy lesson.
Looking at the last 25 years, this strong bartending community has allowed the Bay Area cocktail scene to flourish, creating just one or two degrees of separation between the region’s important bars, and allowing the culture to evolve at an impressively rapid speed.
That continuity of bars and bartenders often tempts people to ascribe a single, distinctive style to the Bay Area cocktail. But the diversity of our scene eludes definition. Our style is often reduced to its reliance on local produce, and while that regionalism is certainly an aspect of our bar scene, it’s not the whole picture. The Bay Area is equally rooted in a rigorous study of the classics, and our drinks style, if we have one, depends just as much on that meticulous methodology as on innovation.
A better question: What are this history’s major inflection points? When, for instance, did we start caring about the quality and provenance of our spirits? When did serious drinks become a requirement for fine dining restaurants? When did stand-alone bars become destinations? When did tiki get upgraded to craft-cocktail standards? When did our city’s bartenders become local celebrities?
To answer these questions, we have to go back to 1992.
Muddle, muddle, toil and trouble
Before it could kick off the modern cocktail revolution, San Francisco had to relearn the classics. That began with Enrico’s, which opened (for the second time) in 1992. For this incarnation, its opening bartender was Paul Harrington, who had previously worked at the Townhouse in Emeryville. Harrington reintroduced San Francisco to classic cocktails like the Aviation, the Hemingway Daiquiri and, most importantly, the mojito. The explosive popularity of the latter at Enrico’s led to seasonal variations of the drink, muddled with local fruit.
In subsequent years, this approach, driven by muddlers and produce, was often incorrectly assumed to be the Bay Area style, a generalization that ignores the classic cocktail roots that took hold. Who else had an Aviation on the menu at the time?
Enrico’s became a hub for all of its era’s aspiring bartenders, including a Portland, Ore., transplant named Marcovaldo Dionysos, who arrived with an arsenal of old classic cocktail books.
Later, when Dionysos helped open Absinthe in 1998, he rode the Encrico’s momentum, creating a menu of wildly popular gin cocktails — notable for a decade when vodka was king. Retro libations and modern classics, like the Ginger Rogers, continue to fill the Absinthe bar today.
Both Enrico’s and Absinthe spawned other ambitious bar programs, including Clock Bar, where Dionysos later worked. Jonny Raglin got his chops at Absinthe, then went on to found other Absinthe Group bars, including Comstock Saloon, colaunched with Jeff Hollinger. Raglin would also establish the bars at Dosa and Nopa, and Hollinger would write th influential book “The Art of the Bar.”
The farm-to-table influence: Sourcing and ingredients
Using local produce was one thing. Responsibly sourcing and putting care into basic ingredients like spirits, ice and sweeteners was another, and Thad Vogler’s early years at the Slanted Door were critical in defining that. Vogler scrutinized the provenance of spirits like no one had before, pulling many popular big-name brands off the shelf because he found them to be poor quality. Approaching spirits like wine, he traveled worldwide to visit spirits producers, cementing his conviction — expressed in his recent book, “By the Smoke and the Smell” — to use products from grower-producers. That conviction continues to define the style at his own bars, Bar Agricole and Trou Normand, as well as other bars he helped build, including Camino, Jardiniere and Beretta.
It was also at Slanted Door that bartender Jennifer Colliau began exploring higher-quality sweeteners. Instead of relying on the standard liqueurs and mixers based on highfructose corn syrup, Colliau created her own syrups. In 2008, she would go on to launch these syrups commercially, under her Small Hands Foods label, a brand that has become common behind local bars.
Erik Adkins, current bar director for the Slanted Door Group, who took over when Vogler left, was significant in spreading this gospel by fostering a new generation of influential bartenders at (now-closed) sister bars like Heaven’s Dog, Coachman and Wo Hing.
Meanwhile, in the East Bay, Berkeley’s César took a cue from the farm-totable food movement that was born at Chez Panisse next door. Founded in 1998 by Chez alum Richard Mazzera, the groundbreaking bar compiled a massive collection of Sherry, eau de vie and innovative drinks, creating a perpetually packed bar and training ground for bartenders like Jessica Maria (Hotsy Totsy), Dylan O’Brien (Prizefighter) and Scott Baird (Trick Dog).
But perhaps no one put a bigger emphasis on sourcing high-quality spirits than Julio Bermejo. For decades, the margaritas at the Bermejo family’s Outer Richmond restaurant, Tommy’s Mexican, were made with mixto Tequila, an agave spirit blended with corn, wheat and artificial ingredients. When Julio Bermejo discovered Herradura Tequila, made from 100 percent agave, it sparked a revolution. Though his quest began in 1989, it took Bermejo years to stock a full bar of good Tequila — and even longer to spread the Tequila gospel. (Eventually, in 2001, he earned the title of U.S. Tequila ambassador.)
The famous Tommy’s Margarita transformed the expectations of what Tequila should be in practically every Bay Area bar, and it also paved the way for future bars that would be driven by a single-spirit focus: Smuggler’s Cove (rum), Rickhouse (whiskey), Loló (agave-based spirits), Whitechapel (gin).
Food & beverage synergy
By the time Range opened in 2005, the modern cocktail movement was exploding in the Bay Area, and a tightly defined community was forming. Range became one of the most popular places in San Francisco to get a drink — and a job. An all-star cast of bartenders at Range, including Brooke Arthur, Carlos Yturria (now co-owner of the Treasury) and Dominic Venegas were the backbone of the Bay Area’s growing cocktail community.
At the same time, chef Phil West’s kitchen spilled over to the bar with a daily cocktail special that challenged the bartenders to think as dynamically as the chef did.
But cocktails still hadn’t graduated to the fine dining stage they occupy today until Cyrus came along in 2005. When the Healdsburg restaurant opened, bartender Scott Beattie introduced his unique brand of meticulous, for aged ingredient and visually impressive cocktails to the wine drinking counties.
Beattie’s work, revolutionary for its time, created the expectation that all fine dining restaurants should incorporate cocktails as a holistic experience. Of the seven Bay Area restaurants that currently hold a perfect three Michelin stars, all but two offer cocktails or spirits designed to match the experience of the food.
Era of the dedicated cocktail bar begins
Until the critical year of 2006, all of the Bay Area’s craft cocktail programs had opened in restaurants. That changed with Cantina and Bourbon & Branch.
The Tenderloin’s Bourbon & Branch gave the Bay Area its first speakeasy and Prohibition-inspired cocktail service, but its opening was equally newsworthy for its bartending staff, an Avengers-style collection of talent that included Dionysos, Venegas, Jon Santer (Prizefighter) and Neyah White (Nopa). Its operating group, Future Bars, would go on to open some of the biggest bars in town: Local Edition, Rickhouse, Tradition, Pagan Idol and Ginger’s, among others.
Bourbon & Branch began to transform the perception of what standalone, neighborhood bars could be, making them destinations for a night on the town despite not being a club or having a kitchen. That continues to be true today at places like Rye, Brass Tacks and Third Rail.
It was also in 2006 that tiki — a genre for which the Bay Area has always had a fondness — took a turn for the (more) serious and came into the modern era, with the opening of Forbidden Island in Alameda. The assumption had long been that complicated 10-ingredient tiki recipes were impossible to build into a business using craft cocktail ingredients, but at Forbidden Island, Martin Cate changed that.
Its success lit a fire under the feet of classic tiki establishments, like Tonga Room and Trader Vic’s, to up their cocktail game. And it made possible today’s highbrow tiki bars like Pagan Idol, Jungle Bird in Sacramento and, of course, Cate’s own Smuggler’s Cove.
The ubiquity of the craft cocktail
With the opening of Beretta in 2008, craft cocktails arrived in the down-market restaurant, demonstrating that even casual, high-volume weeknight spots could serve well-made cocktails using quality ingredients. Bar manager Thad Vogler used a different unrefined sweetener (in many cases, Small Hands Foods syrups) in every drink on the opening menu. The original bar staff included the entire opening crew from Bourbon & Branch. The house was packed every night, despite the fact that there were no big brands available and no cranberry juice. All in a pizzeria in the Mission.
Beretta’s combination of casual food and great cocktails brought the bottom way up, establishing the expectation for well-made cocktails anywhere there is a bar. Places like Ramen Shop, the Saratoga and Maven continue the tradition.
These days, other forces continue to carve the landscape of Bay Area cocktails. The high cost of doing business here is not only driving up cocktail prices, it’s creating a reality in which bars need to churn out large volumes to stay in business — making small, intimate bars extremely difficult to open and endangering dive bars.
Still, a new generation is evolving the styles and trends of the bars that came before. This year’s Bar Stars work at a few of them — Pagan Idol, the Sea Star, 54 Mint, Dirty Habit and, once again, Beretta — and there are plenty more.
Wildhawk, for example, is a powerhouse of female bartenders mixing up potent classics and innovative drinks, while Pacific Cocktail Haven (PCH) is flawlessly blending unusual ingredients like snap peas. Benjamin Cooper makes the weird accessible but is also adept at customized, tailor-made drinks. Miminashi and Duke’s Spirited Cocktails are giving Wine Country reasons to drink more than just wine, and ABV is helping to redefine the drinking experience with its Over Proof pop-ups. Prizefighter continues to redefine the neighborhood bar while championing consistency and bartending techniques — basics many bars have neglected in the quest to over-innovate.
What will bartending here look like in another 25 years?