Yesterday, as I’ve done so often in recent months, I found myself sitting at my empty bar in silence, reflecting on the unfathomably surreal circumstances that have ushered us so deep into this foulest of years.
For more than a decade leading up to this, our business, Royale — a bar and venue for live music located in the heart of San Francisco’s Nob Hill — has had the good fortune of gradually blooming into a small-scale neighborhood institution. We didn’t build it from the ground up, didn’t invent the name, but for the past and best 10 years of my life, Royale has been my second home, my livelihood, and, most essentially, a gathering place for a diverse community of neighbors, musicians, artists, and weirdos of every imaginable pedigree.
Faced with abrupt closure mid-March, we’ve been shuttered now for over six months, finding ourselves up against considerably more than just the invisible scourge we’ve seen ravage our unmanageable country. We’ve come to learn the true character of our obstinate building owner, who expects rent to be paid in full, regardless of our inability to do any business at all. We’ve jumped through continuous hoops with the health department, who insist bars provide “bonafide meals” without providing a clear definition of the term. Given the lack of clarity and assistance to our local industry, we’ve genuinely wondered at times if the city cares if we survive or not.
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On the single day in August that we took a stab at to-go food and drink service, both the police and health departments were called on us within two hours in response to inexplicable “anonymous complaints.” Later that same night, we were broken into and robbed by opportunists who’d seen us newly back in business. While they made off with less in merchandise than the price of changing our locks, the message is resoundingly clear: Our business is in a new kind of trouble, with no apparent end in sight.
Anybody’s mom can tell you a bar was never the safest place to hedge your life savings. We could have gone to law school, learned to code. But for me, personally, tending bar downtown was how I fell in love with this city in the first place. The confidence and community it afforded me quickly proved more valuable than the education for which I initially moved to the Bay Area.
When my partners and I took the terrifying leap to buy our own place, we overextended ourselves financially and worked for peanuts for years, but the pride it gave us to lock up with our own keys at the end of the night was worth it. We went on to meet our wives behind this bar. Played host to some of the biggest nights of friends and loved ones’ lives. Raucous wedding receptions. New Year’s Eves. Championship runs and colossal letdowns alike. Monumental election nights. We spent them all in here, together.
Somewhere along the way, we started to turn a small profit. Ubers started pulling up out front full of kids we’d never seen before. We brought on a small staff of unique, wonderful people. We counted on the business, and people counted on us in return to provide a valuable constant in their own lives, a place to feel both safe and known, to bring a date, to see a live show. We felt validated, but more so, we felt grateful.
I think back now to the last few nights of business in March as the regulars sat and wondered out loud how worthy of concern this whole scare was. It still felt a world away, a headline in someone else’s paper. With no reference for the implications of this specific type of threat, we were blind to it, and now are paying, as we have so often in this learn-as-you-go business: the hard way.
Make no mistake, none of us want our doors opened a day before it’s widely accepted as safe to do so. We watch the news with the same morbid curiosity and dread, as the mayor’s updates omit us from reopening phases. We know where we stand, at the end of the line.
At the same time, we do wonder whether the city realizes how many employees of our industry it stands to lose, just how many families will be forced to renegotiate their living situations if specific economic relief isn’t targeted soon. We wonder how the health department expects establishments like ours — lacking neighboring restaurants to partner with or ample sidewalk space for outdoor seating — to meet their absurd requirement to provide meals with drinks, when we don’t have the facilities or budget to make them.
We still feel the palpable support of our people out there. They knock on the windows, stare longingly at our calendar for better news. They ask what we’ve heard from the city, as if we had any more reliable intel than anyone else can scrounge up. Last week, we cleared the paperwork to break ground on a 40-foot outdoor parklet. We’ll hammer it together ourselves and try our hand at serving a small number of patrons al fresco on the fringe of the fraying Tenderloin. It’ll make for a story either way.
Until that day comes, I’ll sit here in this empty space we built to be shared, waiting along with everyone else to know how deep the hole goes, and mourning the innocence we all had leading up to this. In hindsight, they appear to have been the best of times indeed. And mark my words — this ain’t over yet. I cling to the hope that we’ll find a way to weather this ugly saga and further prove our resilience, that we are worth saving, and that we do belong to this street corner, the way my heart still belongs to this room.
Royale is open for limited outdoor service from 4–9 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays beginning October 8. A GoFundMe directly supporting the staff can be found here.
