A Ginger’s revival in the FiDi
Ginger’s has been around the block before.
Literally: The bar’s entrance, now tucked into diminutive Hardie Place, used to be around the corner on Kearny Street, where Rickhouse now is. Same building, different doors. Ginger’s previous iteration, called Ginger’s Trois, inhabited that Kearny-facing space until 2009. That’s when Future Bars (the group behind Bourbon & Branch, Pagan Idol, Tradition, et al) took over the bar. They kept Ginger’s Trois alive for a few months, then closed, revamped and reopened as Rickhouse. It was out with the slumpy gay bar; in with the artisan whiskey bar.
But Ginger’s had already been around the block, and around the block before that. It all began in 1978, when Don Rogers opened a gay bar called Ginger’s — named for the movie star who shared his surname — at 100 Eddy St. Its success produced Ginger’s Too, nearby
The Deco Lounge Sidecar at the newly opened Ginger’s, the latest iteration of the legendary gay bar.
at 43 Sixth St., in 1985. Shortly thereafter Rogers closed the original Ginger’s, but came back with Ginger’s Trois, at 246 Kearny, in 1991.
The reign of Ginger’s Trois was long and legendary. It belonged to a genre of gay bar that Michael Flanagan, who chronicles such histories for the Bay Area Reporter, classifies as the “businessman’s bar.” He cites Trinity Place, Belden 22 and Wilde Oscar’s — creatures of the 1970s and ’80s — and the longer-lived Sutter’s Mill. These, like Ginger’s, were Financial District gay bars. Not the Tenderloin, not the Castro, not even the Mission. Not gay bars lodged within neighborhoods of gay residents, but scattered instead among office buildings and professional life.
Ginger’s Trois wasn’t exactly seedy, but it certainly wasn’t hip, either. One former customer characterizes the clientele to me as “khaki” — more of a place for after work than for Saturday night.
Did Rogers’ move from a high-density gay bar neighborhood to FiDi diminish Ginger’s gay-ness? Maybe so. Flanagan once quoted Rogers as having called Ginger’s Trois, by the time he sold it to Future Bars, as a “people’s bar,” adding, “I didn’t know for sure who was gay and who wasn’t. I didn’t care.” Maybe, too, that changing demographic was simply a sign of changing times, as everyone began to frequent each other’s bars, gay and straight, more and more.
The 2009 closing of Ginger’s Trois, to make way for an upscale craft-cocktail establishment, falls neatly in line with the succession of shuttering gay bars that we continue to see.
The new Ginger’s, open since May, attempts to reconcile with that history. Each of the menu’s cocktails (there are only five) is named for a gay bar of San Francisco’s past: there’s the Ghost of Ginger’s, of course, and the Lexington Manhattan, the Deco Lounge Sidecar, the Esta Noche and the Pink Party — the latter named not so much for a bar but for an annual Castro district Pride party that Michael Sedlacek, Ginger’s bar manager, used to attend.
“I definitely wanted to use our background as a cocktail-driven bar company,” says Sedlacek of the drink menu. “We still have really good products, fresh stuff. But I wanted to keep it very accessible. Nothing too crazy. Nothing too cocktail-y.”
As a general rule, the drinks taste sweet. The Ghost of Ginger’s also tastes light and refreshing, so much that you might forget you’re drinking gin. Its intense, fresh mint quality, met with tangy lime juice and sparkling wine, puts it somewhere between a hipster cocktail and a panty dropper.
The Esta Noche carries just enough tartness from lime, and fizziness from ginger beer, to cut the mild heat of the jalapeño; it might have been my favorite cocktail. The Sidecar is the peachiest you’ll ever taste, substituting peach liqueur for the classic cocktail’s orange liqueur. And the Pink Party, despite being extremely pink, is among the menu’s least sweet offerings, with Lillet Rosé and hibiscus, wafting a medicinal-cherry aroma and countering its fruitiness with a balancing herbal note.
Sedlacek had been the manager of Rickhouse for three years when it occurred to him that they ought to resurrect Ginger’s. The downstairs space at Rickhouse, originally intended for private events, “wasn’t working out,” he says.
“I used to close the bar (at Rickhouse), and I’d be in the office and see the original Ginger’s signs in there,” he continues. “Being a part of the LGBT community myself, I’ve seen all these gay bars closing, and it makes me sad.”
The vintage Ginger’s sign hangs in the new Ginger’s. Plenty else has changed, though: There can’t have been many jalapeño-cucumber Tequila infusions (as in the Esta Noche) in the first three lives of Ginger’s. But the earlier bar likely served plenty of Manhattans and Sidecars, and maybe even once or twice a Gin-Gin Mule, which the Ghost of Ginger’s riffs on.
All cocktails are $9— a price that, adjusted for inflation, would have pleased Herb Caen, who in 1989 approved of the Ginger’s Too’s slogan as “A Downtown Inexpensive Drinking Bar For People With Money.” (Cocktails at Ginger’s Too cost 99 cents.)
Atmospherically, the new bar straddles genres. There are pool tables, but also tea lights; Japanese-style paper lanterns, but also sometimes aDJ playing episodes of “Soul Train.” Movies play silently on a wall. On a recent visit, I counted at least three Lionel Richie songs played. It might be more composed than Ginger’s Trois, but it certainly feels like the most understated, the most unaffected, of the Future Bars empire.
Happy hour is Ginger’s best time so far. “I know there’s people working in FiDi who just want a comfortable, safe space,” Sedlacek says. Still, though, he was thrilled last weekend when he looked around and a dance party had begun organically, lasting for hours.
On a personal level, Sedlacek mourns the loss of gay bars in many San Francisco neighborhoods — mere satellites now, revolving around the Castro’s shining orb. “A lot that aren’t in the Castro are slowly closing,” he says. “I keep hearing rumors. It’s unfortunate.”
Maybe the new Ginger’s is Future Bars’ redemption for having closed one of those gay bars down in 2009. But at the end of the day, although they hope to bring back many regulars of Ginger’s Trois, they recognize that they’re doing something new — that they’re not Ginger’s one, two or trois. That’s why they opted not to call it Ginger’s Quatre, Sedlacek says.
“I just kind of wanted to reset,” he says. “I know we aren’t the same bar. I just wanted a fresh slate.”