The latest authentic dining experience? A record scratch

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.

Inspired by Japan’s jazz kissas — the music-centric cafes tricked out with collections of LPs and high-fidelity sound systems — listening bars continue to pop up in San Francisco. The trend tracks: We might be ground zero for tech, but on the flip side (pun intended), we’ve long evangelized anything vintage and analog.

Since Bar Shiru, the first listening bar in the Bay Area, opened in 2019 in downtown Oakland, the Bay Area has welcomed Union Square’s Harlan Records; Moongate, “a lunar-inspired listening lounge” upstairs from Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown; and Cow Hollow’s Bar Crenn, the more casual side of Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn’s Atelier Crenn. More chill bars like 20 Spot, Laszlo, High Treason, and The Royal Cuckoo have long played vinyl, whereas Phonobar turns records into a dance party.

Mixing drinks while spinning records at a bar is one thing, but now more restaurants are entering the fray. Which means that, between serving great food and schmoozing with guests, restaurateurs have to make sure someone is minding the sound system.

“It’s a living, breathing thing that needs regular upkeep,” Bar Shiru co-owner Daniel Gahr says of his setup, which includes a Line Magnetic 34-IA vacuum tube integrated amplifier and a VPI Super Scoutmaster turntable with a JMW memorial tonearm. Tube amplifiers can blow. Belt-driven turntables can snap. Gahr spends thousands a year in upkeep. And then there are the basics: Someone has to be on duty to flip records.

“I had a new GM,” says Marc Zimmerman of the new East Cut-based Superprime Steakhouse, “and he said, ‘Hey, we can play Spotify here if I get a little busy, right?’” Wrong. Zimmerman, who likes to play jazz from the ’60s and ’70s (“that hard bop era”), retorted, “Sure, you can play it — when we’re not open.” 

Zimmerman, who recently transformed Yokai, his high-end izakaya, into an even higher-end steakhouse, may have tossed the old menu, but he kept the hi-fi system, which includes two Technics record decks and vintage 1970s JBL 4341 pro series studio speakers. It’s the duty of the host to keep the music flowing. “We’ll set a playlist. When we run through a 25-minute side, someone has to turn it,” he says.

Side A, the new Mission restaurant making waves for elevated comfort food like gargantuan chicken fingers in a pool of honey mustard, takes the music element even more seriously. The DJ booth, set against shelves lined with just a fraction of the collection of 2,500-ish albums, is the first thing that greets patrons. The collection is less pure jazz and more funk, R&B, pop, and soul. Mounted from the ceiling are three Tub’s Audio speakers. There are acoustic wall panels.

Co-owner Caroline Brown, a professional DJ, is not messing around. For eight years, with the restaurant project in mind, she and her husband, chef and co-owner Parker Brown, collected albums with great full sides that she can let run. On days off, the couple goes on the hunt, sifting through stacks everywhere from Amoeba Music and Rooky Ricardo’s to Rain Dog Records in Petaluma, buying up to 150 albums at a time. (“I’m going to lose all my money to this addiction,” Caroline says.) 

The couple are generally the only ones at Side A who touch the records — meaning, on nights when Caroline is off, Parker has to function as both chef and DJ. 

Caroline has had to learn the hard way how to be tethered to a turntable while running a high-maintenance restaurant. When I dined at Side A one evening, she had sportingly decided to play 45s all night; in retrospect, that might not have been the best idea — “unless I could find a 45 that gave me enough time to talk to guests and run to the bathroom.”

Restaurants are not delicate environments. “We designed the DJ booth out of metal so it’s sturdy,” she says. “But of course we’ve had shit happen.” Three weeks in, one of the bartenders was running around and bumped the booth and scratched a record. There was a silver lining: “It’s a blip of a second, and it makes it feel more like a house party.” 

However, a moment of quiet is OK. “That’s the nice thing about playing records,” says Gahr, who favors jazz, soul, and Afrobeat. “When a side ends, there’s some silence. I tell everyone, ‘Don’t be scared of it.’ Sometimes you forget what the last song on Side A is. Sometimes you’ve got a little dead wax. It’s kind of a fun reminder that we are actually playing albums.”