Taking the bro out of the bar

This column originally ran in the Off Menu newsletter, where you’ll find restaurant news, gossip, tips, and hot takes every week. To sign up, visit the Standard’s newsletter page and select Off Menu.

There’s been a notable shift in the city’s bar scene. Instead of designing spaces to be dark, masculine, and made for illicit entanglements (cue the Coldplay joke), bar owners have started making a concerted effort to let in the light and femininity. 

In San Francisco, the “bar-ateurs” most committed to this aesthetic are Nate Valentine and Jamal Blake-Williams, who just added a couple of skylights to the buildout of their new Bar Darling in the Marina. 

At Bar April Jean, which they opened last summer in North Beach, they added windows to highlight a curvaceous interior of pistachio-green and warm wood, giving “more Gwyneth, less Norm,” as I wrote then. But perhaps their truest tribute to sunshine as a mixer is at Peacekeeper in the TenderNob. In 2019, the duo invested an undisclosed (but clearly exorbitant) amount in a 40-by-18-foot  retractable roof. And plants. A ton of plants.

As post-pandemic drinkers have leaned into earlier hours and more juice-y cocktails, this turn to prettier — dare I say, more femme — bars seems logical. Now, the thought of using a secret password to make our way through darkness to be served teeny coupes of pure alcohol by bartenders in suspenders and waxy mustaches pretending like it’s Prohibition times seems a little absurd. 

Bourbon & Branch circa 2006? We already did that. 

On Friday, I stopped by Bar Darling just after it opened at 2 p.m. The sun was miraculously shining, which made it feel even more day-spa inside. Zellige tiles — a study on variations of sea-foam green — lined a fireplace, and the walls were beautifully hand-painted with trees. There was a pool table, but it felt like a wholesome activity, less the shark-ish kind. The big outdoor patio was filled with dogs, their owners sipping refreshing drinks like the Tam Tam, made with gin, carrot juice, saffron, honey, lime, and crushed ice for an affordable $14. It’s the kind of cocktail that presents as if it just happens to have alcohol in it.

“We wanted a more inviting daytime environment — I want light, I want air, and I want it to feel San Francisco,” Valentine said of the space. It’s also intentionally more nurturing, evidence of a woman’s hand; in this case, Blake-Williams’ wife, Brittany Busacca, who designed Bar Darling and April Jean. “We’ve been touched by the number of women who say the space makes them feel safe, seen, and inspired to gather with their friends,” she said. 

This doesn’t mean, however, that I didn’t count an equal number of men as the outdoor seats filled up by 4 p.m. They just weren’t running in packs.

But even if you take the bro out of a bar, you can’t always take the bar from the bros. The guy who left the bathroom — decked with black-and-white hexagon tiles in the shape of flowers — right before I entered? He left the seat up.