10 Cool New Clubs & Lounges
The room around you is mauve, though it changes color every 15 minutes. The drink in your hand -- a blackberry martini -- has been prepared by a painter from Amsterdam, doubling tonight as your bartender. A drag queen spins from the ceiling as lounge music plays in the background. And you haven't even touched the stuffed quail.
Relaxing in San Francisco's Supperclub, it's clear that the city is back in business. This place captures the feel of a town that has bounced back from the darkest days of the dot-com bust. It's a scene dominated by venues that are as interested in atmosphere as they are in serving excellent food and innovative drinks. Call it San Francisco 2.0.
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"We wanted to create an experience," Supperclub co-founder Tad Glauthier says, "where you could indulge all of your senses." To this end Supperclub offers food, music, visuals, the occasional massage, and what Glauthier calls "punctuation marks of performance art," in a setting encouraging interaction among the guests and the wait staff (this interaction primarily occuring on dozens of pristine white beds).
While Supperclub is certainly one of the most eye-popping of these sleek new venues, it has plenty of achingly hip company. Sutra and The Poleng Lounge both offer Asian food in rooms that could easily pass as nightclubs, with Poleng also serving as a concert venue for emerging and local artists. Recent additions Circa and NOPA offer variations on the California cuisine made famous by Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck. What these venues illustrate is a city that is reclaiming the excitement of the Roaring Nineties.
Or, perhaps, the Twenties. One of the most intriguing aspects of San Francisco's recent resurgence has been the appearance of several speakeasies -- bars modeled on the Prohibition-era establishments famous for their bootleg liquor and enticing illegality. Newly opened Slide is perhaps the most popular and swankiest of these. Built on the site of an actual speakeasy, Slide reflects its owner's desire to bring the history of San Francisco into a nightclub atmosphere.
"We were interested in thinking about what the city represents," said Lyndsey Hall, one of Slide's managers, "and merging that with a contemporary sensibility." The result is a bar that combines period detail and the vocabulary of the era with the innovative cocktails (and admirably heavy pours) that are one of the defining features of the current San Francisco scene.
Bourbon & Branch is even more period-specific: an unmarked door, an unlisted number and a reservations-only policy. Of course, the buzz generated by these policies has made it one of the city's worst-kept secrets. On any given night, its bar is packed with customers enjoying premium spirits and prohibition-era music. And if Bourbon & Branch's extensive liquor selection isn't extensive enough, there's Nihon, a whiskey lounge boasting more than 100 premium whiskeys, including 80 single-malt scotches, as well as a private room offering bottle sales and storage.