Welcome to Swig City, where we point you toward can’t-miss drinks at the best cocktail bars, restaurants, and friendly neighborhood dives in the Bay Area. Cheers!

Close your eyes and imagine a weekday happy hour at a dive bar in San Francisco. There’s a heavily used pool table on a black-and-white checkered floor, an outdoor table or two, and clusters of friendly neighbors meeting up for drinks. Above all, there are no over-elaborate cocktails made with tinctures and shrubs. Instead, it’s mostly gin and tonics, vodka sodas, and cold beer on tap. 

OK, there are frozen espresso martinis, because this is San Francisco in 2025. 

This is the scene that greets patrons at Mary’s on Haight, a “straight-friendly gay bar” and the newest addition to a neighborhood experiencing a nightlife and culinary renaissance. It opened Sept. 4 in the space that used to house Trax, just in time for the annual Haight Ashbury Street Fair. After a week in business, Mary’s has already become an after-work destination for a mixed crowd: gay and straight, trans and cis — because, again, this is San Francisco in 2025.

Owner Aindrèas O’Donnell says this mixed crowd is very much into mixed drinks, along with beer and shots. Fernet, Tito’s vodka, Jameson Irish whiskey, and Espolón tequila are what people are drinking most, O’Donnell says. “But we do a good bloody mary, too. And a martini. I don’t think there’s any excuse not to do a good martini.”

With an interior best described as “under the top,” Mary’s might be the least rainbow-filled LGBTQ+ space in town, although the soundtrack leans heavily on queer icons like Jessie Ware, Kylie Minogue, and Troye Sivan. On one wall, a framed invitation to Trax’s first-anniversary party in 1985 includes some cheeky wording about a softball team the bar once fielded, shouting out the players’ “fantastic weinies and buns.” Trix, the regular drag show at Trax, is slated to return in the coming months.

For more than a decade, SF’s queer communities had to grapple with a seemingly endless procession of bar closures, and Trax’s demise in June — the beginning of Pride Month — sent a collective groan through the city. But the past year has seen an upswing, with Q Bar reopening after a devastating fire as a hedonistic dance club, Lobby Bar establishing itself as the Castro’s most elegant place for a cocktail, and women’s sports den Rikki’s drawing Valkyries and Bay FC fans in droves.

More specific to Haight Street, Mary’s is among a clutch of once-dormant venues to come back to life, including O’Reilly’s, which took over the Milk Club space, and Club Deluxe and the Green Heron (formerly Hobson’s Choice), which are scheduled to reopen in the coming months. Indeed, the owners of both forthcoming projects have stopped by Mary’s to welcome the bar to the neighborhood.

But it’s the Trax regulars whom O’Donnell and his team are most eager to please. Apart from ripping out a bench along one wall, zhuzhing up the restroom, and putting a table outside, they were wary of altering anything too much. The most conspicuous change is the floor — still perceptibly crooked underfoot but now surfaced in vinyl rather than carpet. 

Truly, there can be only one storied dive in the Haight with a gloriously faded carpet, and it’s Zam Zam. “Yeah,” O’Donnell says, “we can let them have that.”