The Tenderloin’s turnaround is real. Just ask this whiskey bar owner

Welcome to Swig City, highlighting the can’t-miss cocktails at the city’s best bars, restaurants, and clubs.

The Tenderloin has always been a place for capital-C Characters, and Pomeroy Bar & Grill is quickly becoming one of the best places for them to hang out. 

The Tuesday after-work scene at the brand-new yet old-timey whiskey joint formerly known as Shovels, at Turk and Larkin streets, is decidedly eclectic. One couple requests another round of boulevardiers. Gesturing toward a dozen men in their 30s who are putting in a monster order of food and drinks, the bartender says she’ll be right with us. Around the bar, someone grabs a pool cue to break a fresh game of billiards. 

The crowd is just one sign of how the neighborhood has changed in two years. Ongoing — and controversial — crackdowns on lawlessness and open drug use mean fewer piles of trash and fewer fentanyl users slumped over in the alleyways of Little Saigon. The party’s over, as a recent headline in The Standard put it.

For Tenderloin restaurateurs and nightlife pros, though, the party may be starting back up. The combination of less-chaotic street conditions and the Trump Administration’s back-to-the-office mandates, which may have dragged some federal employees back to the Civic Center area, means renewed hope for the neighborhood. As a server at a nearby Caribbean restaurant put it to me last week amid the lunch rush, “I hate everything else about Donald Trump, but that executive order is helping us.”

As a symbol of gathering optimism, Pomeroy has even rechristened a classic cocktail for the intersection outside. The Turk & Larkin ($15), made with Freeland Spirits gin, ruby port, agave, and the artichoke liqueur Cynar 70, may be a Port Negroni by another name, but it’s an elegant libation indeed. 

Same goes for the Pomeroy ($15), a mixture of Rittenhouse rye, Averna, and Angostura orange bitters — in other words, a Black Manhattan. Amaros appear up and down Pomeroy’s cocktail list, but if their inky bitterness is too bracing for your taste, there are plenty of lighter options, like the Estancia Agua ($16), with tequila, prosecco, lime, agave, bitters, and soda water. There are no fewer than 20 beers on tap, each rotated once the keg runs dry — with the exception of Guinness, which is always available.

Bites run from deep-fried pub fare like buttermilk chicken strips ($15) and cheese curds ($13) to Caesar ($13) and Cobb salads ($19), as well as a gooey double smashburger ($15). After this reporter last month exhaustively ate through almost every fancy hot dog in San Francisco, one Tenderloin social justice advocate emailed to say that omitting Shovels’ customizable $10 dog from the list was a sin. He was correct, especially if you go for a chili cheese dog with raw onions.

For co-owner Douglas Smith, the time for a relaunch was right. Having bought the former Harrington’s during the early phase of the pandemic, he and his team turned it into Shovels, whose name was meant to be an ode to Gold Rush workers and their tools. “I never liked it,” Smith says of that moniker. So he dug Shovels’ grave, so to speak, and reopened this month in homage to Arthur D. Pomeroy, who helped rebuild the 1911 building and other parts of the neighborhood after the 1906 earthquake.

Pomeroy’s retains traces of that century-old history in the form of a mosaic over the doorway and a stamped metal ceiling. Behind the bar, Smith — who gives his age as “I’ve been celebrating my 50th birthday for a while now” — hosts regular whiskey tastings from a stock of almost 300 bottles. The focal point of the 1,800-square-foot space, though, is the revamped kitchen. Smith hopes an increasingly lively lunch business can allow the staff — who make black-garlic aioli, ranch, and even Mornay sauce in-house — to show off their culinary chops.

Pomeroy may be the very definition of a classic San Francisco bar. But Smith and managing partner Mark Yatabe disagree on whether it’s a dive. Smith votes yes. “We don’t want to be pretentious,” he says, calling the atmosphere “lounge-like without being snooty.” 

Yatabe shies away from the descriptor. “A dive bar, to me, means dirty bathrooms,” he says. “We have nice bathrooms.” 

The bathrooms, incidentally, are clean. The wider neighborhood is getting cleaner, too. But Pomeroy and its playfully bickering owners are proof that the Tenderloin isn’t losing its soul.