The Spirit World

On the way across Market Street, I tried on my friend’s new pair of Blue Blocker sunglasses. The air was pleasantly cool, as it always is in San Francisco around cocktail hour. The sky was clear and bright, for a welcome change. Nothing about the surroundings stood in need of embellishment.The shades, black plastic frames with enough color and circumference in the lenses to quality as FiDi fashionable, if the name didn’t put us all in mind of decrepit retirees and the infomercials that pander to them, threw a hideous tint over everything. What was the crayon nobody in your first-grade class could find a use for? Burnt umber? Burnt sienna? Either way, I yanked them off quick. “These are, like: Dr. Bronner’s Electric Dream Movie!” Like the bad trip that makes you finally give up on your summer of panhandling in the Haight, to take that filing gig your mom was able to wrangle for you downtown. (Don’t worry: they won’t make you shave the beard.)

To look at it, you’d think the designers behind “B” Restaurant & Bar were similarly opposed to needless embellishment. The space is all glass, vegetation, and terrace seating, the better to take advantage of a location high in the tangles of the Yerba Buena complex. The outdoor tables provide a panoramic view of the majestic surrounding skyline. Behind them, the minimal white bar almost fades into obscurity.

The staff? Not so much.

Having established our small party’s interest in Happy Hour, the gruff bartender could spare no time for our questions about the drink menu, its origins, or its contents. Instead he insisted we choose a table, and dashed off to attend to the bar’s remaining (two) patrons. Perhaps, we mused, he was just keen to direct some tips the way of our younger, more enthusiastic server.

Enthusiasm can be a valuable trait in one tasked with pouring your ice water or conversing with you about the proper course for your early-evening merriment. I prize it somewhat less when it extends to bullshitting the customers about the available booze.

How important is the pineapple, my friend inquired, to that drink you’ve named the “LOVE ON”? “It’s, well, it’s an integral ingredient, because the pineapple helps us deliver the little bit of love we like to add, um … to each drink.” This kid had a future as Tony Snow’s replacement — or as the next Miss Teen South Carolina.

The LOVE ON, not surprisingly, was repugnant: three layers, all purple, each foamier than the one below. Like a liquid equivalent to Jell-O’s short-lived “1-2-3″ experiment of the late 1980’s, except less delicious. (But equally doomed, or so we can hope.) No amount of fruit-delivered love could save such a monstrosity. Onward!

A few blocks east of “B” sits Dada, a SoMa watering hole and art space of recent vintage. I approached the bar warily, in mind of last week’s Onion headlines (”Hard to Tell if Wikipedia Entry on Dada Has Been Vandalized or Not”) as much as the sour notes struck by “B.” Should I expect a menu populated by the chilled vodka of audience confrontation (poured, perhaps, directly on my shoe)? Urinal-cake mojitos? Situationist Sidecars?

More to the point: were we in time for Happy Hour?

“It goes until nine,” answered bartender Molly Williams, earning more than one appreciative nod. Not that we’d have left, anyway. “Purple Rain” was on the jukebox, and I’d already ordered Dada’s current signature drink, a pomegranate “margarita.” Molly asked if I wanted salt on the rim, and I deferred to her judgment on the issue. “It’s not integral to the drink,” she said. But then how do you deliver the LOVE, I caught myself before responding.

Dada’s pomegranate cocktail is also purple, but free of those senseless foamy layers. Its flavors intertwine as easily as the sozzled bankers and bankettes who populate SoMa beyond the end of a 9 pm happy hour. The smoky intensity of the tequila quickly recedes beneath the sweetness of the pomegranate liqueur and the acidity of the lime. A friend pronounced the drinking experience, like the surroundings, “surprisingly unpretentious.” Only one word of caution: the liqueur pushes its luck by the second round. It might be best at that point to turn one’s attention to the straight hooch, or to Dada’s discerning beer selection. (Fin Du Monde: a quebecois ale named for armageddon? Surely Tristan Tzara himself would approve.)

Between sips of Jameson on the rocks, Dada owner Michael Gouddou explained that the pomegranate margarita outsells the bar’s previous signature drink, a flavored-vodka concoction called the “Georgia Peach.” (Score one for the bankettes’ palettes.) Asked about the inspiration for Dada itself, Mr. Gouddou related his experiences at museums and galleries, where he invariably craved more time for reflection on each piece. He opened Dada to provide patrons the quality time, and the serious booze, he found lacking in the typical gallery opening.

As the Pet Shop Boys’ “Minimal” filled the air, I accompanied Mr. Gouddou toward a particularly engrossing piece: “it was worth it (frailty of man),” a 12-foot rendering of Icarus in motherboards. The tragic aeronaut was sculpted from the slightest wisp of frosted glass, while his plummeting wings stretched up the wall for the height of a tallish man, then downward for the same span and out — far enough to allow the curious a peek behind the shimmering green and copper PCB wings at the desiccated resistors within. A spray of motherboard feathers hung from individual cords around the uppermost wing’s tip. An allegory for the collapse of the dot-com bubble, explained Mr. Gouddou. Asking price: $18,000. I asked if Dada tends to attract reflective drinkers with that kind of disposable income. “In this town? Who can tell?”

He was right — anyone old enough to drink around here could be a software millionaire of one stripe or another. Your neighbor’s ability to afford “frailty of man,” and his eagerness to display the piece, might depend entirely on his fin-de-millennium stock options, and his relative proximity to the sun at the time he cashed them in.

It’s a tough climb, any way you look at it, and harder than hell to see clearly once you get up there. Best to start with a strong drink — and to bring along the Blue Blockers, just in case.

Pomegranate Margarita
adapted from Dada

2 oz. Sauza Hornitos Tequila

1 oz. PAMA Liqueur

1/2 oz. fresh lime juice*

* = Dada uses sour mix, but they will happily use the fresh juice if you ask. Take them up on it.

Shake like the anti-artist: a monster laying waste to everything in its path. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lime wedge. Eschew the salt.