I came across two interesting bits yesterday.  First from Eater:

SFoodie’s W. Blake Gray takes a few bites of the “rich bar food” Justin Navarro serves during his ​The Galley pop-up at Valencia St.’s pseudo dive bar, Clooney’s. He likes the French onion sandwich. He “devours” it, actually.

Then, from the SF Weekly article Eater points too:

Clooney’s Pub is a Valencia Street bar that, to be fair, is a little too nice to really be called a dive bar. SFoodie is big fans of Bouncer columnist Katy St. Clair and we know she would say that the pool table and most of the TVs are too functional, and half-a-dozen beers on tap is at least four too many, for it to really be a dive.

Too nice to really be called a dive bar?  Really?  There are dudes in Rascal Scooters getting drunk in there at 6am.  It still manages to smell like cigarettes despite the fact no one has smoked in the place in years.  The bathroom has no graffiti, yet the toilet is nasty enough that you’d never dare use it.  And the cheap beer on tap is Busch.

That’s not to say Clooney’s doesn’t have its strengths: it’s a bargain drunk, they have Star Trek fiction on loan, the pool table is almost always free, and I can drink there well into my 60s.  But it’s by no means a good bar.

Which begs the question, has San Francisco become so pretentious about not being pretentious that we kid ourselves into thinking Clooney’s is not a dive?  And most importantly, is there anywhere left in San Francisco that’s crappy enough to avoid rubbing elbows with self-described “foodies”?

[Photo by Armand Emamdjomeh]