San Francisco’s Historic Cocktails and Barbary Coast Saloons
During the Gold Rush, miners floated into the city and out into the diggin’s to try to strike it rich. Many of these prospectors were sailors who jumped ship in San Francisco in search of gold- or just adventure. Outgoing ship captains had a tough time finding crews for their return voyages, so many ships were left abandoned in the Bay.
One ship, the Arkansas, was damaged on the way into San Francisco and left on the beach at what is now Pacific and Battery Streets. Two years later, a hole was cut into the side of the landlocked ship and made into a saloon- The Old Ship Ale House. Over the years, the ship became stable as landfill surrounded its base. Upstairs (on the former deck) was built a rooming house, and downstairs continued as The Old Ship Saloon.
Ironically, this abandoned ship became a site where captains refilled their crews from abandoned ships: Many a sailor was served a drug-laced drink in this bar and shanghaied back to into service onboard another boat. The Old Ship Saloon still exists today on the same site, though it was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and fire, and spruced up and retrofitted over the years.
Read about the Niantic, another ship-turned-store that no longer exists, here.
In 1853, a grand four-story building called the Montgomery Block was built at the edge of the Bay, which was Montgomery Street at the time. In this building was located an opulent bar, the Bank Exchange, where Duncan Nichol worked and created San Francisco’s most famous cocktail for more than 50 years. This drink is the Pisco Punch.
Before the Panama Canal opened, ships sailing to San Francisco had to round South America and frequently stopped in Peru along the way. From there they brought with them the local brandy, called Pisco, to San Francisco.
The Pisco Punch was so popular it was described by Rudyard Kipling in 1889 as being, “compounded of the shavings of cherubs’ wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and the fragments of lost epics by dead masters.” Thomas W. Knox described it in 1872. “The first glass satisfied me that San Francisco was, and is, a nice place to visit. The second glass was sufficient, and I felt I could face small-pox, all fevers known to the faculty, and the Asiatic cholera, combined, if need be.”
The Pisco Punch recipe was a well-kept secret by Duncan Nichol, and the actual recipe died with its creator in 1926. The Bank Exchange had already closed at that point (Thanks, Prohibition.) but the Montgomery Block survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, and wasn’t demolished until the 1950’s. Today, the Transamerica Pyramid stands where the Montgomery Block once did. Inside the closed restaurant on the first floor is a plaque dedicated to the Pisco Punch, installed in 1938.
Local historian and pisco lover Guillermo Toro-Lira has spent years retracing the history of this drink, and the results are published in his book Wings of Cherubs. Today, the Pisco Punch is enjoying a healthy comeback, and can be found in about a dozen cocktail bars throughout San Francisco.
Speaking of bars, most did not survive the earthquake of 1906 or the deadly fire that followed it. One that did was The Saloon in North Beach, which was opened in the 1861 as Wagner’s Beer Hall. It is the oldest continuously operated (except for Prohibition, of course) bar in San Francisco. Today, the small bar hosts live blues acts.
Another notable bar in North Beach is Tosca Café, which opened in 1919. Today many of the furnishings belong to another era, though not quite the era of the Barbary Coast. The antique espresso machines, the Formica tables, red leather banquettes, and jukebox with opera transport us back to the early 1900’s instead of the late 1800’s.
Nearby Spec’s Twelve Adler Museum Café was a speakeasy, lesbian bar, and jazz club before its current incarnation. Since 1970 it is has been home to wacky historic and nautical ephemera and an unusual band of regulars. Spec’s was considered a Bohemian hangout, while Vesuvio across the street is most definitely considered Beat. It is located next to City Lights bookstore and was once frequented by the likes of Jack Kerouac.
But not all the notable and historic bars are located in North Beach. While The Old Ship Saloon is believed to be the oldest site of a continuously operating bar in San Francisco, the Mission District’s Elixir is believed to be the second. According to public records, the bar opened in 1858 and was rebuilt after the post-quake fire of 1906. The carved mahogany bar is probably pre-quake, and other signs of its long history include the separate ladies’ entrance from the pre-Prohibition era when women weren’t accepted in saloons except to purchase to-go beer for their husbands.
Unbeknownst to many, Trad’r Sam’s, the tiki dive bar in the Richmond, may just be the oldest tiki bar in the world. While the information needs to be verified, it appears the bar has been operating as a tiki bar (technically a proto-tiki bamboo bar) since the 1930’s. The Tonga Room in the Fairmont Hotel, built in 1945, remains one of the last grand palaces of tiki. The hotel’s former pool is now a lagoon on which a band-carrying barge floats, and the dancefloor is built from the remains of the S.S. Forester, a lumber schooner that once traveled regularly between San Francisco and the South Sea Islands.
The much less tropical Buena Vista has been serving Irish Coffees- up to 2,000 a day- since 1952. The drink was a recreation of the same cocktail from Shannon Airport in Ireland, but from this bar its popularity grew throughout the US and the world.
Another drink that originated in San Francisco was steam beer: a low-tech style made in accordance with the local climate- cool but without much access to ice. The Anchor brand of steam beer dates back to 1896 in San Francisco, but the actual brewery closed or moved several times due to the earthquakes, fires, and Prohibition. Fritz Maytag bought the near-bankrupt brand in the 1960’s and put Anchor Steam beer in bottles. Anchor both pre-dated the microbrew trend and later the micro-distilling trend when Maytag opened Anchor Distilling in 1993. Currently the distillery makes vintage style spirits like rye, gin, and genever.
Bartenders Past
We haven’t touched on the Martini cocktail, which many claim originated in the town of Martinez. Well, that’s one theory anyway. In his cocktail history book Imbibe!, author David Wondrich explores four of the most plausible stories of the drink’s origin and finds all of them lacking and/or unverifiable. One of those theories is that Jerry Thomas, who would become the country’s most famous bartender and author of the first bartender’s guide in 1862, created the drink while he was working in San Francisco for a traveler headed to Martinez. While Wondrich calls this theory “extremely unlikely,” it does speak to the fame of Thomas.
Jerry Thomas jumped ship in San Francisco during the Gold Rush as did so many sailors, and worked as a miner, a minstrel, and (most importantly) as a bartender at saloons perhaps in San Francisco and likely in Sacramento and/or Downieville. Reports at the time said cocktails in San Francisco were some of the best served in America (and we like to think they are again). While Thomas spent more time working in New York than anywhere else, we are one of the many cities that can lay claim to his presence.
Born after Thomas’ visit, native Californian William T. “Cocktail” Boothby became the city’s most famous mixologist and the author of Cocktail Boothby’s American Bar-Tender in 1891. Boothby worked as the “Presiding Deity” at Hotel Rafael Club House and later at the Fairmont Hotel and Palace Hotel, where he created the Boothby Cocktail: basically a Manhattan with a champagne float. The San Francisco Chronicle in the year of his death 1930 called him, “probably the best-known bartender in San Francisco in pre-Volstead days.”