The Riptide is a proper phoenix. When this place burned down, it singed a lot of salty hearts. There's always excessive hand-wringing when old bars go up in flame, fail to renew their lease, or otherwise blink out of existence. They can sit there rotting for a decade, moldy and forgotten. No one goes, so eventually their inevitable demise is announced. Once they're closing, suddenly everyone's a fan. Facebook gets morose about all the good ol' places disappearing.
We don't appreciate what we've got until it's gone, right?
Before the fire, the Riptide might have been a little moldy but it was far from abandoned. It was alive and kickin. OB locals were still bearing witness to its quirky, reliable divey-ness every night until it burst into flames on a Tuesday morning in August 2015. I'm not gonna get misty about it or wax on like we used to hang out here all the time. We're inlanders from 16th Ave. This isn't *our* spot. And you don't want to front about other people's spot.
It was a foggy night - of course it was - when we jumped on the MUNI to make our way out, out, out, to the last bar between here and Japan. There's always something going on at The Riptide. Music, fundraisers, drink specials, open mikes. But the thing that finally got us in the door was White Trash Fridays. Pabst, Fireball, and free Brother's Pizza. Free? Ok, we're game.
Comforting. It's apparent from the first step through the door that this place is as good as ever. Enough weird bric-a-brac to erase the idea that it's been completely rebuilt in the past couple of years. As far as you can tell, the regulars have never moved from their barstools and the stuffed elk's head has stood watch, undisturbed, for the past 50 years. This place could be under "local's outpost" in the dictionary. We're the only people in the joint who don't know the bartender's name. She told us, but sadly it's already slipped my mind. Like I said, it's a damn fine spot, just not our spot.
Such is the state of the city that we were skeptical about the promise of free pizza. Yet there it was, a stack of pizza boxes on a spare table near the bathrooms, next to a stack of paper plates, the moist barroom air slowly turning the cheese to the consistency of a foam mattress. Free pizza is a heartwarming, soul-feeding sort of thing. That plus a pint of Pabst, and you're really time travelling.
After a few pints (we'll skip the Fireball, thanks), we headed off into the blustery outerlands night. The new MUNI trains have just started running on the L line. The seats are sparkling clean. Like, you could perform surgery in these things. A few weeks ferrying the great unwashed of SF from downtown to the beach will fix that little red wagon, but for now, we just enjoy the novelty of a train car so fresh that it's played host to neither upchuck nor overdose.
Still hungry, we step off before 19th Ave to grab some late night rainbow roll action at Sushi Zen. Waiting at the register for our to-go boxes, some familiar voices pipe up from behind us. Our favorite neighbors cruise through the door, apparently with the same idea. We hang out, get lit on Sapporos, swap stories. The perfect serendipitous twist to a night in our foggy, magical little hamlet on the western edge of the city.
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