The Outer Richmond has the city’s hippest food and wine scene — said no one ever.
That is, until now. On a glorious Sunday afternoon — the kind that makes you forget fog is even a thing — humans are spilling out of Rampant Bottle & Bar on Balboa Street. They’re putting names on an hour-long wait list at The Laundromat, shopping for bottles at Slake, grabbing a cinnamon roll at Devil’s Teeth Baking Company or a sardine-and-egg sandwich and a cup of borsch at Iggy’s Place.
In the six-block corridor of Balboa between 33rd and 39th avenues, everyone seems to know everyone, and they want to keep it that way. They proudly wear their “West at It Gets: Outer Richmond Forever” T-shirts from Eye & Hand Society. They make sure to support each others businesses. As I take notes, one local leans over conspiratorially. “Don’t tell them our fog secret,” she says — meaning it’s not that bad over here. At least in the winter.
Over the thumping music at Rampant, there are hugs and laughter and hellos. The 6-month-old natural wine bar and shop is hosting an oyster pop-up, the first of a series on local, sustainable seafood. Out on the sidewalk, I’m balancing an aluminum tray of Hog Island half-shells on my lap while sitting in one of the chairs the crowd has dragged over from an unsuspecting neighboring parklet.
The wine of the evening is Los Chuchaquis sparkling Albariño from the San Ynez Valley. My tour guide, Erin Feher — who co-owns the beloved Butterfly Joint just down the way and writes about style and design for The Standard — has clearly been indoctrinated. She enthusiastically calls the wine “salty and bubbly” and declares it one of her favorites. Another fan raves about buying it as a gift for everyone they know.
The crowd, which skews on the older end of Gen Z, gives natural-wine natty: mustaches and dad caps, ironic T-shirts (Barefoot Contessa), band totes (The National), dogs in striped sweaters, a flutter of butterfly hand tattoos. It could be Bushwick, but it’s Balboa Street, and Rampant owners Charlie O’Leary and Jack Pain, who live in the neighborhood, fit right in themselves.
On top of a carefully curated selection of bottles, the duo offer 16 natural wines (i.e., “clean and not flawed”) by the glass — specifically those they hope will convert the haters. “People say natural wine is funky, cloudy, and tastes like kombucha,” says O’Leary, who admits that “there is an ocean of horrible natural wine out there.”
But this is not the case with the Albariño — nor, they hope, a new orange wine that O’Leary describes as “approachable, delicious, complex” from Kelley Fox, a female producer based in Oregon. Soon they’ll have in SF-based Isabella Morano to do a tasting of her Isa Wines in person. The little food menu has wine-bar go-tos like bresaola and tinned fish, but also hummus made by the woman who owns Al-Masri, the longtime Egyptian and belly dancing restaurant down the street.
Just a couple of blocks up, there’s more natural wine to be had at Slake, a year-old shop that specializes in clean drinking — “frankly, an exhausting conversation, but it’s also an important one,” says owner Daniel Lovett. Lovett did his time working everywhere from Nopa to Saison before starting a family and wanting to ditch the restaurant grind. Natural wine, he says, isn’t just a millennial affectation. “It’s about drinking the way we’ve learned to eat here in the Bay. Keep it clean and small and local.”
Lovett, who lives around the corner, opened the shop in part for selfish reasons — he didn’t want to drive 15 minutes to get a good bottle for himself. He prides himself in the little gems. His first wine purchase was from Dani Rozman of La Onda, who is based in the Sierra foothills: “He came into the city with dirt under his fingernails, selling wine out of his own trunk. I felt like I’d struck gold.”
By 6 p.m., the neon marquee at the almost 100-year-old Balboa Theater is punctuating the dusky blue sky, now airbrushed with coral. Just across the street is The Landromat. The 2-year-old restaurant was the catalyst for Balboa Street’s recent rise of cool. There’s an hour wait for a table — though an even longer wait can be found on smashburger Wednesdays — but we squeeze in knee-to-knee at the bar for a Sutro Sauer, a tasty vermouth cocktail. Dinner is an easy-going mix of crispy, square-pie Calabrian chile and sausage pizza littered with teeny red Peruvian pearl peppers, plus a hefty side of fried Brussels and a tasty, everyday kind of kale salad.
Owned by Jenna O’Connell and Kevin Rodgers — who, last year, split from their founding partners Adam Bergeron and Jaimi Holker of the indie Balboa Theater — The Laundromat, not surprisingly, also leans into natural wines, as well as adjacent signifiers like monsteras and mullets. O’Connell says they work with “folks making purposeful, low-intervention wine that begins with sustainable farming” but also keep juice boxes at the ready for the bevy of kids who come in with their parents.
During the day, Rodgers, the baker in the relationship, makes organic bagels. They’re working on a caviar cream cheese. And when they aren’t running the restaurant, they host things like Strip and Dip — a cold plunge at the beach. “More events, more parties!” O’Connell says of their plans.
The couple — also Outer Richmond denizens — are all in on their hood. “A lot of our neighbors have lived here longer than I’ve even been alive,” she says with admiration. “It’s sweet to walk to work every day past people who have been here for generations, and they’re really excited about having us here too.”