The Latest Menu at SF’s Most Prestigious Cocktail Bar Echoes All the Ones That Came Before

For its 10th anniversary, Mission cocktail bar Trick Dog has released its 18th themed menu, a sort of greatest hits compendium called the “Museum of Trick Dog Art” complete with a trifold museum-pamphlet menu. There’s even a diagram of the two-floor bar so patrons don’t have to wander aimlessly.

It can’t be easy to keep this going indefinitely, but as it enters its second decade, the James Beard-nominated, two-time winner of World’s Best Cocktail Menu has done it again. Trick Dog’s laboriously constructed cocktail menus get scrapped and replaced every six months, so the museum will permanently shutter in July.

This iteration replaces Trick Dog’s poetry anthology menu, “In Good Spirits.” Previous endeavors included astrological symbols, dogs and—early on and perhaps most famously—an entire cocktail list centered on the Pantone color system. All 17 menus have been displayed in the bar itself, gallery style, prior to opening for service on Tuesday.

This greatest hits presentation allowed the bar to combine non-alcoholic beverages with low-ABV cocktails and “higher-octane” options alike, from the Trick Dog Airways (a tiki drink made with rum and garnished with a mini bottle of the German herbal digestif Underberg) to the Joy of Cocktails, an alcohol-free collaboration with Michelin star-winning chef Seth Stowaway of Osito. There’s even a “dynamic” vodka drink (the TD University) that changes color as if you were in a chemistry lab.

Like so many places, Trick Dog was forced to double down on its creativity during the lockdown phase of Covid, pivoting to become a to-go cocktail joint called Quick Dog that also sold fancified comfort food like hot dogs and chicken nuggets, which are still on the menu. It reopened for full service in November 2021, an anchor tenant in a food-centric pocket of the Mission that also includes Penny Roma, flour + water and True Laurel.

Trick Dog

📍3010 20th St., SF
☎️ (415) 471-2999
🔗 Trickdogbar.com