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‘High Spirits’ captures the soul of San Francisco’s dive bars

By Kitty Morgan

October 9, 2015 Updated: October 9, 2015 1:40pm “High Spirits: The Legacy Bars of San Francisco” by J.K. Dineen.

As we were finishing up this year’s edition of Bar Stars — the barkeeps who are stirring up high-end cocktail culture in the Bay Area — we learned that a local, very not high-end bar was closing. Zeke’s never offered a “cocktail experience” but the opposite: It was a SoMa neighborhood sports bar, packed with fans on game days, frequented by regulars on regular days, both sets of drinkers looking generally for a cold beer and a noisy crowd.

This was a reminder that, too often lately, the Zeke’s among us are closing. Combine the escalating cost of real estate and the influx of new customers who can drop $14 for a drink, and our neighborhood bars are in the crosshairs of gentrification.

Bar Stars 2015

Which is why preservation advocate group San Francisco Heritage started the Legacy Bars and Restaurants project nearly three years ago. The project now lists over 100 places at least 40 years old; the goal is to call attention to and protect these modest treasures. “High Spirits: The Legacy Bars of San Francisco” collects together the stories of 26 classic dives.

The book’s author is J.K. Dineen, who prefaces the book with a memory: His childhood visits with his father to Irish pubs, long before he could drink. The Irish-American boy learns to love the human babble of the bar, and years later is the perfect writer for this book.

Lucky for us. He profiles “places that were shaped by and helped shape neighborhoods: voices on both sides of the plank, the bull — and the bluster, the sounds and smells, the characters that make sure these particular places endure when so many others have faded from history.” The dives in this book may be endangered, and that is sad. But reading Dineen on, say, Sam Jordan’s Bar and Grill or the Wild Side West, you can only feel pleasure. Dineen’s a guy who can tell a story. His portraits are pungent and laced with humor. You can smell the stale beer; you can see the flicker of old neon.

But Dineen is also a good reporter. (He covers real estate development for The Chronicle.) In his epilogue, he talks of how sometimes a bar may, well, no longer fit the needs of a changing neighborhood — some simply outlive their usefulness. He is no advocate for a city stuck in time. He is never treacle-y with nostalgia.

What he cares most about are his true bar stars: the characters who own and work in these dives, and who show up in the wee hours, looking for friendship or respite or a helluva good time. Good people, but also a few not so. This book captures that most endangered landmark: The customer longing not for the novelty of the new, but the scuffed comfort of the old.

—Kitty Morgan

Dineen. Heyday, Berkeley. $18 Kitty Morgan

Assistant Managing Editor, Lifestyle
