Mission District

Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem Opens on Mission

This spot opened the other night in the former Bissap Baobab space on Mission and 19th.  The grill is not yet opened, the video games aren't hooked up, and they got their supply of beer only yesterday (three bucks for a red-white-and-blue Bud), but it seems like it's an alright spot for those interested in loud electric music over the usual metal tracks played at nearby Bender's.

The place is owned by the proprietors of Russian Hill's Bullitt and Tonic bars, so that alone pretty much will tells you what to expect.  The interior is pretty minimal with almost nothing on the walls, big tables, small black pleather stumps to sit on, and no Muppet memorabilia anywhere. However, the bartender who happened to look like Animal (and dismissed the idea of an “opening,” saying they got their license so they just started pouring drinks to whomever walked in the door) indicated there is still a bunch of work to do on the place.

Let's just hope they import their killer sweet potato tater tots to the Mission.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention they will have Jameson on tap “soon.”

Carlos Club Permanently Shut Down For Sketchy Biz

According to Mission Local, the Department of Alcohol Beverage Control has permanently closed Carlos Club outside the 24th Mission BART station for “sketchy cocktail waitressing”:

According to Danielle Shafer, supervisor investigator with the Department of Alcohol Beverage ControlA six-month department investigation, which began 2009 and completed early 2010, found bar owner Carlos Gutierrez and his employees guilty of profit sharing – that is, hiring cocktail waitresses to pressure patrons into buying drinks at a higher rate than normal.

The investigator saw Carlos Club waitresses going around charging customers between $5 and $10 more than the bar’s standard prices and splitting the profits between owner and bar girl employee. This is, said  Shafer, “common practice in certain areas but illegal in San Francisco.” The practice is especially typical, she said, in Asia and Latin America.

The article goes on to say that Carlos has a year to get the liquor license “transferred to an another location and owner” and the business must remain closed until a new owner comes forward.   How long it it will take for this to become the next Bar Tartine or French-inspired Mexican-American Tequila-Whiskey Cocktail Lounge remains unclear.

[Mission Local | Photo by Thomas Hawk]

Local Brewers Create Eponymous Beverage For The Google Shuttle Crowd

Ever since the FDA ban of Four Loko, I've felt that the next logical and questionably legal step in the alcohol-and-stimulant game was to combine beer with Viagra.  Considering the brilliance of Sparks and Four Loko was giving consumers the ability to get hammered yet stay alert until sunrise without slamming lines of cocaine, it only seems sensible to have a beer that prevents whiskey dick.

As it turns out, depraved minds think alike.  Sea Monkey Fuck-Juice (yes, that's actually their name), the local brewers behind the “delicious; inevitable” Valencia Street Gentrification Porter, claim to have fused the two lascivious substances together:

My grandfather once said to me, “Son, you can lead a horse to water, but a man you should lead to beer.” For him, brewing beer was more than just a way to make the days go by. Nothing came before beer, not work, not raising his kids, not even his own health. The only thing he loved half as much as beer was a small collection of Sea Monkeys he kept in a glass jar on his bedside table. Deep down he knew they were just brine shrimp, but that didn't stop him from loving those little creatures with all his heart. Every night he'd throw in a chicken leg or two to keep his pets fed, and every morning he'd clean out the jar and start over because Sea Monkeys don't eat chicken.

Then once in a while he'd wake up with a mad twinkle in his eye and grab a sack of special powder from under the bed. He'd call all us kids into the room and we'd watch as he sprinkled a few pinches of powder over the Sea Monkeys. Before long they'd start pairing up and grabbing onto each other, their little tails flailing as they spiraled like drunken fireworks around and around the jar. Then the old man would add some more powder and the Sea Monkeys would lose their grip on monogamy, one shrimp grabbing onto another onto another in a kind of erotic conga line. And of course after a few more pinches of powder the Sea Monkeys would go completely berserk, swimming around in a dizzying and frenzied aquatic orgy. Eventually the little shrimp would get tired and stop swimming, and then with a somber grin he'd dump the poor, spent creatures down the drain, saying “It's true what they say, if you have to die, die with passion, die with dignity, die in a terrifying underwater sex romp.”

By now you've probably worked out the secret ingredient in my grandfather's recipe.

If you dare to read on, you'll note that they take a shot at the FDA and proclaim that they've temporarily removed “Sea Monkey Love Salt” from the receipe until it is tested for mass consumption, which might explains why Dolores Park yesterday didn't erupt into a uncontrollable orgy of hipsters with an appetite for orgasms fit only for subhuman punks and dogs.

The hardening effects of the beer aside, the brew is quite delicious; and I typically hate porters.  Smooth without lacking flavor, just enough hops to give the beer some taste without offending the palate of the PBR crowd: it's the perfect beer for summer.  The beer is even carted around Dolores Park in a Google-branded duffel bag, an obvious nod to the porter's name, which one of the brewers claim was a consolation prize for a failed interview at the company.  Best of all, they sell these homebrews for the same price as Cold Beer Cold Water flips his generic brews.  And while they lack the swagger and sex appeal of the kingpin of illicit alcohol sales, they make one helluva product.

[Sea Monkey Fuck-Juice]

Vandal Claims Clarion Alley Wall For Himself

It seems like it was only yesterday that a graffiti heart over the freshly painted A Sunday Afternoon an Dolores Park sent the entire Mission community into a tailspin of despair and outrage.  And rightly so: a bang-up mural celebrating everyone's favorite park was defaced.  But it wasn't just that the specific mural was blemished, rather it was that a mural was damaged.

Now it seems like the norm is for SF murals get covered over with tags and pieces.  Eine's series of alphabet murals along Mission Street were defaced within days by the same crew pictured above.  A quick walk down Bartlett, Market, Divis, or one of the various other mural alleys around the Mission show the same thing.  It almost seems antithetical to the core of what street art and graffiti represents: putting art out there, for free, for everyone to see and admire on their own accord.  In a sense, there's now a crew of kids acting as a gallery owners, determining which murals the world gets to check out and which should be reused as a new canvass.

It's a bummer, really.

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