Welcome to Swig City, where we point you toward the can’t-miss drinks at some of the best restaurants, clubs, and semi-secret cocktail bars in SF. Cheers!

While testing drink recipes on patrons at Hayes Valley’s Brass Tacks and soliciting feedback in preparation for opening his own cocktail bar, Mitchell Lagneaux faced a dilemma: Did he want his creations to stand out, or did he want to please customers?

“Someone told me once there are two types of drinks: good and interesting,” he recalls. “Which one do you want to drink?”

Fast-forward a few months, and Lagneaux has managed to answer that conundrum at The Valley Club, the ultra-sexy lounge that opened in mid-June inside of (but independent from) Union Square’s Hotel G. The drinks here are most definitely good — and also pretty damn interesting.

The Valley Club is not a speakeasy, and it’s definitely not just another hotel bar. Rather, it’s the semi-secret space that used to be Benjamin Cooper, one of the city’s most highly regarded dens of iniquity until it closed in 2020. The space is effectively windowless, with a horseshoe-shaped bar, which lends a sense of clandestine coziness that Lagneaux amplified with a visually appealing menu that suggests old-school sex hotlines.

That may make The Valley Club sound, well, sordid. It is not. In fact, several of the drinks, all $18, are among the most complex, layered, and — I’ll just say it — best cocktails I’ve tasted all year.

No. 1 on the list is the Lovemaker, something I probably wouldn’t have gravitated toward without being gently prompted to the fact that it’s a far-out Negroni. A mix of gin, raspberry, vermouth, Campari, and cocoa butter, it’s like biting into a cherry cordial with rose petals at the center — just sweet enough, just sharp enough, and with a luscious texture.

Right behind it is the Midas Touch, an aromatic orange creamsicle of a drink made from bourbon and Galliano and garnished with a rectangle of citrus peel that, in the low, cinematic lighting, seems to levitate above the coupé glass, casting a shadow on the foam beneath. Squint, and you’ll realize it’s a whiskey sour.

Other drinks leverage food chemistry to add a bit of fun, like the Crushed Velvet, an acidic combo of vodka, strawberry, Lillet Rosé, Manzanilla sherry, and basil, for which Lagneaux shaves the edges off a thick prism of ice to induce some extra bubbles. 

If you like ’em spirit-forward, consider the smoky Thick Cut (cognac, pineapple rum, lapsang souchong, and salted maple), which is like spending winter in Tahiti. And if you want no spirits at all, there’s the snappy Phone Sex, made from a nonalcoholic vermouth, shiso, yuzu, and tonic, carried aloft by the shiso’s subtle basil-mint notes. All zero-proof offerings are $14.

Visually and sonically, this is indeed a sexy interior. The soundtrack runs from lo-fi house to neo-soul to 25-minute tracks that feel more than a little tantric. The stools are bouncy, and the couches all but invite a snog. In fact, Lagneaux is more than happy to look up and see people going at it in the corner. “It’s a win for everyone,” he says. “We’re doing our job, and no one’s going to walk out upset — not to say that everyone needs to come in and start making out.” 

The Valley Club’s challenge may be a lack of regulars — hotel-heavy Union Square is a far cry from Lagneaux’s last stomping ground in Hayes Valley. But the owner is undaunted. Union Square is seeing a resurgence, he says, and not just because tourism is creeping back.

He’s confident that locals will be drawn to the idea of a night out on the town. “We’re a couple of blocks from Pacific Coast Haven and from Felix,” he says, citing two esteemed cocktail bars. “We’re creating a reason for people to go downtown and recultivate a neighborhood, essentially.”

The Valley Club, though, is a rather low-key name — almost forgettable. This, too, is by design. Brass Tacks had once been the gay bar Marlena’s, and decades before that, it was called The Valley Club. That was the era when bars weren’t named for branding purposes but mostly to let people know their location. In today’s climate, near-anonymity lends a whiff of allure. “It’s mysterious — an exciting kind of curious,” Lagneaux says.

When this hotline calls, be sure to pick up.