Cigar lovers find their place to puff
There are many reasons for living in a city like San Francisco, and one of them is finding something unexpected, like the Occidental Cigar Club on Pine Street, just off Montgomery in the Financial District.
You would not confuse the Occidental Cigar Club with an outpost of healthy living. In a city where marijuana is celebrated and tobacco is barely tolerated, the Occidental is full of patrons puffing on cigars and drinking strong whiskey or fine wine. The place is full of smoke and good humor, like a private club.
“We are the last bastion of civilization,” said Curtis Post, the founding partner.
Smoking in bars is illegal under the state labor code because secondhand smoke harms employees, but there is a wrinkle here: The Occidental has no employees. Everyone who works there is a partner in the enterprise.
The Occidental is at the end of Belden Alley, which is lined with restaurants. And a sign at the door gives fair warning: “If the odor of fine tobacco products offends you, this is not an entrance.”
“It’s a bar for grownup people,” said John Perricone, who was smoking a big cigar and drinking scotch the other afternoon. Perricone is an occasional visitor — he was in town for a convention — but most of the patrons seem to be regulars, people who seem to know each other, united in their admiration for cigars.
A lot of them are stockbrokers, who come in after the market closes at 1 in the afternoon. Others are blue-collar types, and a few are tourists, out for a taste of supposed city sophistication.
They get some of it at the Occidental. There is a ritual in cutting the ends from the cigar — “We cut it for you or you can do it yourself,” Post said. It turns out there are a couple of ways to cut a cigar, and it has to be done correctly, a kind of cigar etiquette.
Why does it matter? “It’s like pouring a glass of wine correctly,” Post said. “If it’s done right, it makes the wine taste better.”
The Occidental gets its name from the Occidental Hotel, the city’s first European-style hotel, which flourished in the 1860s just around the corner on Montgomery Street. It was at the hotel’s bar that Professor Jerry Thomas, the renowned bartender, supposedly invented the Martinez cocktail, ancestor of the martini. The Occidental and the rest of the old cigar-loving city were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire.
The modern-day Occidental has the clubby feel of a neighborhood place, but it is no shot-and-abeer bar. It stocks 100 single malt scotches, 45 different bourbons, 35 rums, 19 Irish whiskeys, and a number of craft beers. There are also wines, said to go well with cigars — all California wines with a certain style. “If they sell it at Safeway, I don’t stock it,” Post said.
That sort of thing appeals to regulars like Desmond Cliett, an executive with a high-tech firm who comes in most afternoons, sits down with his laptop and a fine cigar and does a little work, as if the place were a coffeehouse with smoke.
He likes getting away from the office. “I like the people, and I like to smoke,” he said. “I like the fabric of the place.”
He had a leaf cigar, one wrapped in tobacco leaf rather than artificial wrapping. This one was a Leaf by Oscar, wrapper from Nicaragua, the binder and filler Honduran tobacco. The price: $22.
Cliett said he discovered the Occidental on his birthday two years ago. “I wanted to celebrate with a drink and a cigar,” he said. “And my girlfriend took me here.”
Not long ago, most of the patrons were men, but more recently the place has drawn more and more women. “On some nights, half the people here are women,” said Tracy Deguise, who was smoking a big cigar the other night. Deguise came with her husband, Kevin.
“It’s a place we can go together, have a drink, smoke and talk,” she said.
“We have lots of friends here, too,” Kevin Deguise said.
Cigars and talk seem to go together, perhaps because cigar smoking is an acquired taste, and smokers tend to band together, like exiles from another time. A patron sitting alone, hunched over his drink is a rare sight.
Cigarette smoking is frowned on at the Occidental. Post dislikes cigarettes, which he says are full of chemicals, are addictive and are discouraged at the Occidental. “Cigars are pure tobacco. You don’t inhale a cigar,” he said.
The American Cancer Society, however, is clear: “There is so safe form of tobacco,” it says. “All cigars are dangerous to your health.”
But people still smoke away. Even a bit of danger is addictive.