“Your Dive” remains the gold standard for day-drinking in the Mission - or anywhere, really.
#GAY BARS SAN FRANCISCO NEAR EMBARCADERO FULL#
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.