Set 'em up again, one last time

Whatever happened to the quiet neighborhood bar? You know, the kind of place you drop into on any night of the week and recognize 90 percent of the glazed eyeballs breasting the bar. The kind of place that never fills up all the way, where there always seems to be a quiet corner table open. The kind of bar where, for most part, the patrons keep it low and quiet and the bartender has time to lean over and chat about baseball or politics or the price of tea in China.

Where did those bars go?

There aren't any bars like that in North Beach. Not that I've been able to find, anyway. Most of the bars around here have slack times, a window of opportunity where you can slip in for a quick one and enjoy some relative calm, but not all of us like knockin' 'em back at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I'm talking about prime time, those post-dinner, pre-sex hours when you're likeliest to want to sit down for a snort with a couple of friends.

All the joints around here are packed to the gunnels then. The bar flies haunting the serious places, like Specs or Gino & Carlo, seem to be mostly regulars, but even there the decibel levels occasionally rise to SFO runway quality.

It can't be that North Beach has more drinkers than it used to. I'm pretty sure it has fewer drinkers than it did when San Francisco was, per capita, the hardest drinking town in country. People used to knock off work and head for the bar; now they knock off work and head for the gym (the sure sign of a civilization in decline). I don't think it's a numbers thing.

Maybe the nature of bars has changed. Or, more precisely, the nature of socializing in bars has changed. I was going to say that we used to be more sophisticated drinkers back in the day, but I keep flashing on an image of myself, resplendent in my yellow "Marty's Tavern Natural Insemination Team" T-shirt and, well, I don't think it's a matter of refinement.

Maybe there are just more younger drinkers now. There do seem to be a lot of callow faces in the joints I frequent. When I was their age, I was too stoned to hang out in bars getting drunk. Is it an age thing?

One thing I know has changed for the worse: all those TVs. A bar is where you go to socialize (ie. talk by moving your lips), not to watch TV. And the places that have TVs tend to leave them on all the time, even when there's no major sporting event on, which I suppose was the justification for tarting up the bar with big screens in the first place. As far as I know, Specs, The Saloon and Tosca are the only major watering holes in this neighborhood without a TV. (And I'm not a hundred percent certain about Tosca.)

Did TVs change the nature of the "drinking experience"? Does bringing an idiot box into a bar make for idiot drinkers? I always assumed it was the alcohol that did that, but.....

Maybe it's the music they play in bars now. You have The Saloon, of course, that features great music; that's not what I'm talking about. I know I'm showing my age, but I don't mind. There's that modern sucky rock, loud and driving, that seems to turn up in every other bar featuring live music. So maybe it's all that lame, sucky music that makes so many bars noisy and unpleasant these days.

I'm really at a loss to explain all this. I'm not even sure I'm right. I think I'm right, but maybe I'm wrong. It sure seems like bars are noisier and more obnoxious than they used to be. If you're a veteran imbiber with your own take on this burning issue of the day, I'd love hearing from you.

In the meantime, can someone open a nice quiet little place with no TVs and no dart board and no sucky rock bands with angsty 25-year-old singers whining through their carefully cultivated ennui? Can someone open a place where the bartender pours honest drinks without umbrellas or fruit in them? A place with a neon cocktail glass outside that crackles on wet nights and only partially works?

Oh, and some opaque yellow windows would be nice, too.





Topics: Specs , Tosca , Gino & Carlo