It was 2010 and my first stop in San Francisco had to be Toronado. This was my first beer trip to the USA and this was perhaps the most famous American beer bar I could name, or at least the most infamous in this city—a dark dive bar on the other side of the world that promised beers I’d never tasted before, beers I’d only ever imagined being able to drink, in a bar with a fearsomely great reputation.
Visit To San Francisco’s Toronado And Consider The Cult Beer Bar Photo Gallery
I walked in from the rain and stood for minutes staring’ at the beer board over my head. I already knew what I wanted—Russian River’s Pliny the Elder—and I’d decided I wanted that beer weeks before, but I couldn’t stop looking at all the other beers I could order. I could drink any of them. All of them. I’d read about this place. I knew that I had to be prepared, to know my order, to place it, to give them cash, leave a tip, and not faff about. It was a cash transaction, coarse, curt, and exactly what I’d expected—it somehow felt like the real deal and that I’d arrived in American craft beer.
I’ve been back many times since and I’m still overawed by the beer list and the bar, and I still always order a Pliny, though I still also spend ages ogling the beer board. Toronado has a pull about it, an intangible, unavoidable magnetism, and it has a comfort of sorts, a kind-of familiar routine in a place that isn’t home. I know there are better places to drink, yet I can’t stay away. It’s the draw of the cult beer bar. The kind of place you hear or read about before visiting’. Then you go and have a great time and you always return, somehow feeling that you must, hoping for a repeat of that first great hit.
The Rake is London’s Toronado. Zly Casy is Prague’s. There’s Rattle n Hum in Manhattan and Barcade in Brooklyn. There are cult beer bars all around the world. People who don’t drink in those places regularly know the names and tell others to go there when, in reality, they aren’t the best places to drink anymore. They are carried along on old reputations from when choice wasn’t there. Not that any of this is bad and I won’t stop going to Toronado when I’m in San Francisco, because visiting longstanding and famous beer institutions like that is definitely a Beer Bucket List tick.
Toronado is a craft beer institution and you must not leave without ordering at least one beer from Russian River Brewing Co (see post 52).
The Lowdown
WHAT: Toronado Pub
HOW: Open daily, 11:30—2am (www.toronado.com).
WHERE: 547 Haight Street, San Francisco, California 94117, USA
