Regulars return to Rumpus Room
his friends, felt like a relief.
That the Rumpus Room would eventually see this day was not a given. During the past year and a half, dozens of bars and restaurants in San Francisco have permanently shuttered, unable to withstand the financial strain of temporarily closing. The Rumpus Room was in a particularly difficult spot: It can’t serve food, so couldn’t offer takeout cocktails or open for inperson service until recently. And with a capacity of 49, the bar is so small that owner Roxzann De Marco said it didn’t make sense to reopen until she could do it at full capacity.
So there was a sense of triumph in getting the Rumpus Room up and running again on Tuesday — triumph not just for De Marco and her staff, but for the larger community of San Francisco dive bars, whose survival had begun to feel threatened even before the pandemic due to everhigher rents, staffing challenges and the encroachment of upscale craftcocktail lounges.
Regulars describe the Rumpus Room as a classy dive bar.
“They’ve got good mezcal, good Tequila and they make a great cocktail,” said Parra.
In addition to dive bar staples like PBR, Tecate and Miller High Life, the Rumpus Room serves local craft beers like Ghost Town IPA, Moonlight Death & Taxes and Scrimshaw Pilsner. The tap handles have always included a local wine and a housemade Moscow Mule. Unlike some oldschool dives where ordering a manhattan might be met with an exasperated stare, the Rumpus Room can mix a proper drink.
De Marco opened the Rumpus Room in 2018, stepping into a long line of bars that had occupied this space since at least the 1930s. Before it was the Rumpus Room, it was known as the Showdown, the Matador, the Arrow, Club Charleston and other names. De Marco remembers coming here when it was the Matador, while she was a college student.
“It was a dark, sweaty DJ place,” she said.
Under her stewardship, it’s a little less dark and a little less sweaty, but she still hosts DJs and other live performances, including drag shows.
After sending her employees home on March 16, 2020, De Marco told them to file for unemployment, and she began collecting unemployment herself. She got lucky, she said, with an accommodating landlord and a small Paycheck Protection Program loan.
“That was a godsend, because we were able to send the landlord something,” she said.
So far, that something has been enough for the landlord, but she knows that those back payments are looming.
Eventually, she caved and got an administrative job. The money was helpful, though the experience revealed that she’s much better suited to being a bar owner than an office worker, she said.
Office workers have long been the Rumpus Room’s main clientele, due to its location at Sixth and Market. “We’re a happy hour bar,” De Marco said. Groups of coworkers would always descend at 5 p.m., guzzling palomas and pina coladas. Will they return, now that many city residents are working from their homes, far away from the buzz of SoMa? No one knows, least of all De Marco.
She still felt nervous, she said, even as she was reveling in the joy of getting the doors open again. With so much of downtown San Francisco’s future still in flux, the longterm fate of the Rumpus Room, to some extent, remained out of her hands.
But that underlying wariness did not tarnish any of the joy that De Marco and her customers felt on Tuesday afternoon.
“I knew people would show up,” said Chris Harrison, whom bartenders refer to as the “mayor” of the Rumpus Room. He holds the distinction of having the most checkins on the app Foursquare, a measurement of how many times he’s visited the bar. According to Foursquare, he’s been here 187 times, though he was careful to note that he doesn’t use the app every time he comes.
“I worried. I didn’t know how the bar was going to deal with all these months of closure,” Harrison said.
But as soon as he walked back in, he said, it felt like no time at all had passed. “It was like riding a bike. All the people I’d expected to be here — they were here.”